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Thursday, April 14, 2016
Two timely stories of marijuana reform not yet helping those serving "Outrageous Sentences For Marijuana"
From two very different media sources today, I see two very notable stories of defendants convicted of marijuana-related offenses serving extreme sentences for a type of behavior that is now "legal" at the state level in some form throughout much of the United States.
First, the New York Times has this new editorial headlined "Outrageous Sentences for Marijuana," which starts this way:
Lee Carroll Brooker, a 75-year-old disabled veteran suffering from chronic pain, was arrested in July 2011 for growing three dozen marijuana plants for his own medicinal use behind his son's house in Dothan, Ala., where he lived. For this crime, Mr. Brooker was given a life sentence with no possibility of release.
Alabama law mandates that anyone with certain prior felony convictions be sentenced to life without parole for possessing more than 1 kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of marijuana, regardless of intent to sell. Mr. Brooker had been convicted of armed robberies in Florida two decades earlier, for which he served 10 years. The marijuana plants collected at his son's house — including unusable parts like vines and stalks — weighed 2.8 pounds.
At his sentencing, the trial judge told Mr. Brooker that if he "could sentence you to a term that is less than life without parole, I would." Last year, Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, called Mr. Brooker's sentence "excessive and unjustified," and said it revealed "grave flaws" in the state's sentencing laws, but the court still upheld the punishment.
On Friday, the United States Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Mr. Brooker's challenge to his sentence, which he argues violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. The justices should take the case and overturn this sentence.
Second, AlterNet has this new piece with this lengthy headline, "As Marijuana Goes Mainstream, California Pioneers Rot in Federal Prison: Luke Scarmazzo and Ricardo Montes opened a dispensary in Modesto. Now they're doing 20 years in federal prison. Their families want them home. " Here is how it starts:
Behind the headlines about President Obama's historic visit to federal prisons and highly publicized releases of non-violent drug offenders, the numbers tell a different story. Despite encouraging and receiving more clemency petitions than any president in U.S. history — more than the last two administrations combined, nearly 20,000 — very few federal prisoners are actually being granted clemency.
Nowhere is this irony more glaring than in the world of legal cannabis. Cannabis is now considered the fastest-growing industry in the nation, yet remains federally illegal. The sea change from the Department of Justice since 2009 has allowed state-legal cannabis industries to thrive. Federal solutions seem to be around the corner and for the first time cannabis businesses are being publicly traded and receiving legal Wall Street investment.
Ricardo Montes and Luke Scarmazzo are two of the 20,000 federal prisoners appealing to President Obama for clemency. They have exhausted their appeals and are serving 20-year mandatory minimum sentences for openly running a dispensary in the early days of California's pioneering medical cannabis law. The irony isn't lost on them that their crimes are now legal and profitable, but their appeals for clemency aren't based on justice anymore — they just want to be home with their kids. Their daughters, Jasmine Scarmazzo, 13, and Nina Montes, 10, are appealing directly to President Obama to release their fathers via a Change.org petition.
Given that the Supreme Court has often stated and held that the Eighth Amendment's "scope is not static," but "must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 101 (1958), I think both these cases should be pretty easy constitutional calls if courts and/or executive branch officials took very seriously a commitment to updating and enforcing Eighth Amendment limits on lengthy prison terms in light of the obviously "evolving standards of decency" concerning medical use of marijuana throughout the United States and the world. But, while hoping for some judicial or executive action in this arena, I am not holding my breath that any of these medical marijuana offenders will be free from incarceration anytime soon.
April 14, 2016 in Drug Offense Sentencing, Marijuana Legalization in the States, Offense Characteristics, Pot Prohibition Issues, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered | Permalink | Comments (1)
"Costs of Pretrial Detention"
The title of this post is the title of this notable new piece authored by Shima Baradaran Baughman now available via SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Spending on U.S. incarceration has increased dramatically over the last several decades. Much of this cost is on incarcerating pretrial detainees — inmates not convicted of a crime — which constitute the majority of individuals in our nation's jails.
Current statutory schemes give judges almost complete discretion to order pretrial detention based on unexplained or unidentified factors. With this discretion, judges tend to make inconsistent decisions in every jurisdiction, some releasing almost all defendants — including the most dangerous — and others detaining most defendants — even those who are safe to release. There are constitutional and moral reasons to evaluate our current detention scheme, but even the fiscal impact of pretrial detention alone calls for an empirical analysis.
Although legal scholarship has applied cost-benefit analysis to other areas of criminal law, this Article is the first attempt at conducting such analysis in the pretrial arena. This Article compares the risk posed by each defendant and the cost of any crimes they may potentially commit while released with the costs incurred by detaining these defendants. The results show that relying on the cost-benefit model provided here, judges could bring significant savings — approximately $78 Billion, increased safety, and potentially more equitable pretrial detention decisions.
April 14, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Important drug offender data begging hard normative policy question regarding noncitizen US prisoners
I just came across this interesting posting and data analysis via NumbersUSA, a group that describes itself as "moderates, conservatives & liberals working for immigration numbers that serve America's finest goals." The posting is titled "Sentencing Reform Legislation Would Disproportionately Favor Non-Citizens," and here are some excerpts (with one very critical line emphasized by me toward the end of this excerpt):
U.S. prisoner data clearly shows two things. One, the majority of low-level drug offenders are serving their sentences in state, not federal prisons. Two, most of those incarcerated in federal prison for drug charges are non-citizens....
[Only] 3.6 percent of all prisoners, or 48,600, under state jurisdiction are serving time for drug possession. The remaining drug offenders were convicted for trafficking and other related offenses, such as facilitating the illicit drug trade. The distribution of drug prisoners in state prisons is fairly evenly divided among Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. A higher proportion of females (24%) than males (15%) are incarcerated for drugs in state prisons.
As of April 7, 2016, there were 196,285 prisoners in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, with 46.5 percent of these prisoners, (91,270) sentenced for drug offenses. The percentage of prisoners incarcerated for drugs is just over two and half times greater than the state prison population. However, overall, there are fewer prisoners serving time in federal prison for drug charges than in state prisons (212,000).
The Federal government collects data differently for state and federal prisoners. In order to get the breakdown of offenses for federal drug prisoners, data from the U.S Sentencing Commission is available. Looking at sentencing statistics from FY2007 to FY2015, a clear distinction between federal and state prison populations is that the proportion of federal prisoners serving time for drug possession is much higher than for state prisoners, and Hispanics are disproportionately represented among federal drug inmates.
There is a higher ratio of Hispanics serving drug sentences for both trafficking and possession convictions in federal prisons. As Daniel Horowitz pointed out, this is because many of the drug offenders in federal prison are serving sentences for drug convictions related to the illicit drug trade on the U.S.-Mexico border.
In response to a congressional request regarding sentencing data for federal drug offenses, the U.S. Sentencing Commission sent data showing that 95% of the 305 individuals serving time in federal prison for simple drug offenses are non-citizens and 95.7 % were sentenced in southwest border districts — virtually all of them in Arizona. Furthermore, 95.7 % of the simple possession drug crimes for which offenders are incarcerated involved marijuana and the median weight of the drug involved in cases from border districts was 22,000 grams (approximately 48 pounds). Only 13 simple possession cases were tried in non-border districts in FY 2014.
In a letter sent to Sen. Jeff Sessions last fall, the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that 77% of individuals convicted of federal drug possession charges and more than 25% of individuals convicted of federal drug trafficking charges in FY2015 were non-citizen.
The profile for federal drug prisoners is different than at the state level, and this is why Congress needs to recognize and address these differences when crafting legislation that will effect this population. Federal drug and immigration enforcement are for now inextricably tied together....
Sentencing reform bills reducing penalties for some federal prisoners (S. 2123 and H.R. 3713) are being portrayed by their supporters as a long overdue corrective to harsh sentencing laws for individuals who violate federal drug laws, which they argue create racial disparities in the nation's prison population.
Reforming drug sentencing laws is one thing. Releasing criminal aliens back into U.S. interior, is quite another. The Obama Administration has already shown its willingness to do the latter, including those who were deemed to be criminal threats to the public. Without a bill with strong, clear language and, most importantly, a Congress willing to extend oversight over the executive branch, it is plain that the sentencing reform legislation likely to soon come before Congress will accomplish little more than to provide an early release for dangerous criminal aliens, while still failing to hold President Obama to account for his failure to enforce U.S. immigration law.
This data discussion is a bit confusing because of its many references to both federal and state prisoners and both trafficking and possession offense and both percentages and absolute numbers. But, data particulars and confusions aside, the piece rightly highlights a very important data reality integral to any sophisticated discussion of efforts to reduce the federal prison population, especially for drug offenses: a significant percentage (and thus a large total number) of imprisoned and future federal drug offenders who would benefit from federal sentencing reform (perhaps up to 35% or even higher) would be noncitizens.
It understandable that persons deeply concerned about illegal immigration, and likely eager for policy changes always to prioritize benefits to US citizens over noncitizens, would find troublesome the statistical reality that federal sentencing reforms would benefit noncitizens significantly. However, this perspective may change if one realizes that noncitizen serious federal drug offenders who would get reduced sentences under any proposed sentencing reform would not get released "back into the US interior." Rather, any and every noncitizen serious federal drug offender who gets a reduced sentence is always going to be subject to immediate deportation once release from prison.
The important reality the many imprisoned and future noncitizen federal drug offenders are all to be deported after serving their federal prison sentences raises the hard normative policy question that is begged in any discussion of this data. That question is: What normative policy goal are we really achieving — other than spending billions of federal taxpayer dollars to house, feed and provide medical care to criminal noncitizens — by having noncitizens serve extra long federal prison terms if they are all to be deported at the end of these their terms no matter what?
Bill Otis and many others opposing proposed federal reforms are quick to stress the risk of increased domestic crime if we reduce current and future federal sentences and thereby release former offenders back into US communities sooner. But that argument really does not hold up when we are talking about noncitizen offenders who will be forcibly deported to another nation after finishing whatever length of sentence they serve at federal taxpayer expense. (Indeed, I suspect imprisoning noncitizens in the US for long terms actually leads criminal noncitizens to become ever-more connected to US citizens and makes them even more likely to seek illegal return to the US after they are deported).
April 13, 2016 in Data on sentencing, Detailed sentencing data, Drug Offense Sentencing, Offender Characteristics, Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Race, Class, and Gender, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (33)
Continued compelling commentary on the Clintons, crime, punishment and the 1994 Crime Bill
In this post over the weekend, titled "The many challenge of a fully nuanced understanding the Clintons, crime, punishment and the 1994 Crime Bill," I highlighted nearly a dozen articles and commentary to stress that there are many nuances essential to a full understanding of just what the 1994 Crime Bill did (and did not) achieve, and just what has been the role and record of former Prez Bill Clinton (and Prez candidate Hillary Clinton) on criminal justice reforms past and present. And because these stories are so nuanced, and I glad we are continuing to see lots of worthy commentary on these fronts, such as these recent pieces from various sources:
"Bill Clinton, 'Black Lives' and the Myths of the 1994 Crime Bill: Pause the debate for some inconvenient history."
"The Messy, Very Human Politics of Bill Clinton's Crime Bill: The activists who denounce the bill now have much in common with the activists who supported it in 1994."
"Bill Clinton Is Wrong About His Crime Bill. So Are the Protesters He Lectured."
"We confronted Bill Clinton about race: 'In that moment he revealed himself and his true thoughts on black people'"
I am very pleased to see this important 20-year-old story is getting some useful attention now as part of the 2016 campaign. But, for a variety of reasons, I hope attention soon turns to the more recent (very mixed) records of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on crime and punishment with focused questions to all the remaining 2016 candidates about whether, why and how they will be eager to continue or to change various modern federal criminal justice policies and practices.
April 13, 2016 in Campaign 2016 and sentencing issues, Race, Class, and Gender, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sunday, April 10, 2016
The many challenges of a fully nuanced understanding of the Clintons, crime, punishment and the 1994 Crime Bill
The notable interchange a few days ago between former Prez Bill Clinton and protestors (noted here) has brought renewed attention to the contributions of the 1994 "Clinton" Crime Bill to mass incarceration and the massive reduction in modern crime rates. Like every other important criminal justice story, there is considerable nuance to fully understanding (1) just what the 1994 Crime Bill did (and did not do), and (2) just what this single piece of federal legislation has produced with respect to crime and punishment two decades later. Also full of considerable nuance is the role and record of Prez Bill Clinton (and now Prez candidate Hillary Clinton) on criminal justice reforms past and present.
All the political, policy and practical dynamics of the Clintons' record and the 1994 Crime Bill justifies considerable scholarly commentary, and lots of important nuances cannot be fully captured by soundbites or brief blog postings. Nevertheless, I thought it might be useful here, in service to encouraging a richer understanding of all these matters, to collect below a number of notable commentaries I have seen that help highlight why any simple account of the Clintons, crime, punishment and the 1994 Crime Bill is likely to be simply wrong:
"The Current Crime Debate Isn't Doing Hillary Justice: To grasp the difference between Clinton and Sanders you have to truly understand the 1994 crime bill."
"In Defense of the Crime Bill: Both Democratic candidates are disavowing Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill — and that's a shame, because the law was a huge success."
"Get Your Memes Right: The 1994 Crime Bill Didn't Create Mass Incarceration"
"Fact-checking Bill Clinton's Philly defense of his controversial crime bill"
"Here's what everyone is getting wrong about Bill Clinton's 1994 crime reforms"
"The Clintons Aren't the Only Ones to Blame for the Crime Bill: Black leaders also embraced it."
"Former CBC Chair Who Voted For 1994 Crime Bill Tries to Cover Up His Role: Kweisi Mfume had boasted the CBC put its 'stamp' on the bill, the largest crime bill in U.S. history, which provided new cops and prisons."
"20 Years Later, Parts Of Major Crime Bill Viewed As Terrible Mistake"
"Hillary Clinton and the Tragic Politics of Crime: The criminal-justice policies she now denounces once helped her husband capture the White House."
UPDATE: Here is another recent addition to this list via the New York Times: "Prison Rate Was Rising Years Before 1994 Law"
April 10, 2016 in Campaign 2016 and sentencing issues, National and State Crime Data, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Thursday, April 07, 2016
Former Prez Clinton takes on protestors complaining about his tough-on-crime policies
This new Reuters article, headlined "Bill Clinton confronts protesters who say his crime reforms hurt blacks," reports on a notable exchange about crime and punishment involving former President Bill Clinton today. Here are the details:
Former President Bill Clinton faced down protesters angry at the impact his crime reforms of 20 years ago have had on black Americans and defended the record of Hillary Clinton, his wife, who is relying on the support of black voters in her quest for the presidency. The former president spent more than 10 minutes confronting the protesters at a campaign rally in Philadelphia for his wife on Thursday over criticisms that a 1994 crime bill he approved while president led to a surge in the imprisonment of black people....
In Philadelphia, several protesters heckled the former president mid-speech and held up signs, including one that read "CLINTON Crime Bill Destroyed Our Communities."
Video footage of Hillary Clinton defending the reforms in 1994 has been widely circulated during the campaign by activists in the Black Lives Matter protest movement. In the footage she calls young people in gangs "super-predators" who need to "be brought to heel." Hillary Clinton, 68, who also has faced protesters upset by her remarks, in February said she regretted her language.
Bill Clinton, 69, who was president from 1993-2001, on Thursday defended her 1994 remarks, which protesters say were racially insensitive, and suggested the protesters' anger was misplaced. "I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children," he said, shaking his finger at a heckler as Clinton supporters cheered, according to video of the event. "Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She (Hillary Clinton) didn't."
"You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter," he told a protester. "Tell the truth."
Hillary Clinton promised to end "mass incarceration" in her first major speech of her campaign last year. She has won the support of the majority of black voters in every state nominating contest so far, often by a landslide....
Bill Clinton said last year that he regrets signing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law because it contributed to the country's high incarceration rate of black people for nonviolent crimes. On Thursday, he did not explicitly recant those regrets, but appeared to be angry at any suggestion the bill was wholly bad.
The legislation imposed tougher sentences, put thousands more police on the streets and helped fund the building of extra prisons. It was know for its federal "three strikes" provision that sent violent offenders to prison for life. The bill was backed by congressional Republicans and hailed at the time as a success for Clinton....
Bill Clinton's remarks on Thursday drew criticism online. Some saw him as dismissive of the Black Lives Matter movement, a national outgrowth of anger over a string of encounters in which police officers killed unarmed black people.
April 7, 2016 in Campaign 2016 and sentencing issues, Prisons and prisoners, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, April 05, 2016
"Keeping Track: Surveillance, Control, and the Expansion of the Carceral State"
The title of this post is the title of this new article by Kathryne Young and Joan Petersilia which reviews a trio of criminal justice books. Here is the abstract:
This Review argues that an important root cause of our criminal justice ails can be found in the social processes that comprise the system's daily activities and forms of control over individual Americans — processes largely taken for granted. To explore the ground level interpersonal interactions that underpin the criminal justice system, we engage three recent books: Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship by Professors Charles Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel; On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Professor Alice Goffman; and The Eternal Criminal Record by Professor James Jacobs.
Substantively and methodologically, the books might first seem an odd trio. But together, they reveal the importance of a key phenomenon: "surveillance" in the word's broadest sense — keeping track of people's movements, histories, relationships, homes, and activities.
April 5, 2016 in Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sunday, April 03, 2016
Might the US be willing to learn from the German prison experience?
The question in the title of this post is prompted by this new Huffington Post commentary by Vincent Schiraldi, headlined "What we can learn from German prisons." The commentary provides a bit of a preview of this segment to air tonight on 60 Minutes under the title "This is prison? 60 Minutes goes to Germany: Germany's prison system keeps convicts comfortable, costs less and has lower recidivism rates, but would Americans ever accept it?". Here is the start of the Huffington Post piece:
On Sunday, April 3, 60 Minutes will air a story on several U.S. delegations to German prisons by advocates, researchers and public officials that should be mandatory viewing for anyone who works in or cares about America's massive prison problem. In a country that has only a fraction of our incarceration rate, even Germany's deepest-end prisons are humane and decent in ways that, at least at present, are difficult to fathom in the U.S. context.
The groups who funded or organized the trips - the Vera Institute of Justice, John Jay College of Justice, and the Prison Law Office - hope to change that. Inspired by these delegations, when I was working for Mayor Bill de Blasio's Office of Criminal Justice, I organized a study tour to one of the prisons they had visited - the Neustrelitz Prison near Berlin, which houses adolescents and young adults.
The place couldn't have been more different than a U.S. prison or juvenile facility. In fact, it was a bit of both, because young people are allowed to be tried in Germany's juvenile courts up to age 21, unlike U.S. juvenile courts whose jurisdiction expires somewhere between ages 16 and 18, depending on the state.
The young people we met were all involved in programming from farming, to wood shop, to metal work, to in-depth therapy. The freedom of movement was extraordinary, with most youth sleeping in unlocked rooms at night and eventually going on home visits and transitioning out to daytime work, returning to the facility at night. Sentences were much shorter than those experienced by people locked up in the U.S., which partially explains why only 79 out of every 100,000 Germans are behind bars, compared to America's world-leading incarceration rate of 700 per 100,000.
April 3, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (2)
Saturday, April 02, 2016
"Unfinished Project of Civil Rights in the Era of Mass Incarceration and the Movement for Black Lives"
The title of this post is the title of this newly published article authored by Nicole Porter. Here is the piece's introduction:
American criminal justice system has been dominated by relentless growth for the last forty years. The culture of punishment, in part driven by political interests leveraging "tough on crime" policies and practices marketed as the solution to the "fear of crime," has been implemented at every stage of the criminal justice process: arresting, charging, sentencing, imprisonment, releasing, and post-incarceration experiences in the era of mass incarceration.
While it may not excuse criminal offending, the destructive effects of mass incarceration and excessive punishment are visited disproportionately upon individuals and communities of color and reinforce that the project of the civil rights revolution remains unfinished. In recent years, there has been growing consensus across ideological lines to address mass incarceration. Yet, policy changes are incremental in approach and do not achieve the substantial reforms needed to significantly reduce the rate of incarceration and its collateral impacts. Incremental policy reforms include: reducing the quantity differential between crack and powder cocaine that results in racially disparate sentencing outcomes at the federal level and in certain states; reclassifying certain felony offenses to misdemeanors; expanding voting rights and access to public benefits for persons with felony convictions; and adopting fair chance hiring policies for persons with criminal records.
The Movement for Black Lives, or Black Lives Matter, offers a new public safety framework to finish the project of civil rights in the era of mass incarceration. This movement has a sophisticated analysis that seeks to address the underlying structural issues that result in poor policy outcomes for communities of color, including high rates of incarceration. The public safety framework does not excuse criminal offending, but offers a new approach of viewing justice-involved persons — a disproportionate number of whom are African American and Latino — as worthy recipients of public safety responses not dominated by arrests, admissions to prison, or collateral consequences.
Aligning a Black Lives Matter framework with public safety strategies expands policy responses beyond the criminal justice system to evidence-based interventions demonstrated to reduce criminal offending. Research shows that early childhood education, quality healthcare, and targeted employment programs can help reduce recidivism and prevent justice involvement. More importantly, the Black Lives Matter framework can help to shift norms away from the punitiveness that dominates U.S. criminal justice policy.
April 2, 2016 in Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Race, Class, and Gender, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (3)
Noticing the notable nature of states now categorically banning LWOP for juvenile murderers
This Washington Post piece by Amber Phillips spotlights an interesting reality as states continue to engage with some of the Supreme Court's recent Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. This piece is headlined "States are getting rid of life sentences for minors. And most of them are red states." Here are excerpts:
As America revisits its tough-on-crime policies from decades past, much of how to fix our criminal justice system is still up for debate. Most prominently, a bipartisan bill to rewrite the nation's sentencing laws is slogging through Congress and may well get stuck there.
But criminal justice reform advocates are celebrating a surprising amount of success in one area largely off the radar of the national debate: banning the practice of sentencing minors to life in prison without parole.
Twenty-one states ban entirely or in most cases the practice of sentencing minors to life without parole. Many of those bans have been instituted in the past decade. Lately, Republican-leaning states have been picking up the cause, an indication that the sentencing practice instituted in the 1990s is on its way out.
On Tuesday, Utah became the second state this year to ban such sentences, after South Dakota. And in the past few years, Wyoming, Nevada and West Virginia have instituted some version of the ban. Since a critical 2012 Supreme Court decision on this issue, the number of states that have banned the practice has more than tripled, said Jody Kent Lavy, director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth.
The debate, like many others in criminal justice reform, is hard to separate from race; advocates say the minors who have been sentenced to life without parole are 10 times as likely to be black than white. "There's clearly been a shift and a recognition that young people need to be held accountable in more age-appropriate ways, and we've really gone too far in our approach to youth sentencing," Lavy said....
In Utah, the debate to eliminate the practice from the books went pretty smoothly, said state Rep. Lowry Snow (R), who sponsored the bill. "I didn't have to twist a lot of arms," he said.
Snow and advocates say the arguments speak for themselves; they cite research that adolescents' brains are still growing and, thus, are not as skilled as adults' in controlling impulses or thinking through long-term actions. "They're not the same people when they're 16, 17, 18 than they are when they're 40 and 50 years old," he said.
Another argument that seems to resonate among more conservative, religious lawmakers is one of redemption. "Utah is very prone to a recognition that there can be redemption and people can be given a second chance," Snow said....
At its basic level, the debate over whether to keep or get rid of life sentences without parole mirrors the debate over the death penalty: What's the most appropriate way to punish someone for a heinous crime? In that sense, there is still opposition to the idea of banning life-without-parole sentences for minors.
Some crimes "are so heinous, so violent, so destructive … that maybe in rare cases they should receive the sentence of life without parole," state Rep. Merrill Nelson (R) said on the floor of the Utah statehouse after he spoke with the father of a teen who was killed by another teen. "Why should we take that discretion away from the judge?"
A victims advocacy group, the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Murderers, says a ban is out of step for several reasons: The potentially un-ending parole process is often "torture" for a victim's family, and while it doesn't advocate for any specific sentence, it does not see why the life-without-parole option should be taken off the table....
And success, as described here, is relative. More than half of U.S. states still allow the sentence, after all. But given the broader political context in which these bans are coming, criminal justice reform advocates will take what they can get.
April 2, 2016 in Assessing Graham and its aftermath, Assessing Miller and its aftermath, Offender Characteristics, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (0)
"Racial Disparities in Youth Commitments and Arrests"
The title of this post is the title of this notable new policy brief from The Sentencing Project with lots notable data, which gets started this way:
Between 2003 and 2013 (the most recent data available), the rate of youth committed to juvenile facilities after an adjudication of delinquency fell by 47 percent Every state witnessed a drop in its commitment rate, including 19 states where the commitment rates fell by more than half. Despite this remarkable achievement, the racial disparities endemic to the juvenile justice system did not improve over these same 10 years. Youth of color remain far more likely to be committed than white youth. Between 2003 and 2013, the racial gap between black and white youth in secure commitment increased by 15%.
Both white youth and youth of color attained substantially lower commitment rates over these 10 years. For white juveniles, the rate fell by 51 percent (140 to 69 per 100,000); for black juveniles, it fell 43 percent (519 to 294 per 100,000). The combined effect was to increase the commitment disparity over the decade. The commitment rate for Hispanic juveniles fell by 52 percent (230 to 111), and the commitment rate for American Indian juveniles by 28 percent (354 to 254).
As of 2013, black juveniles were more than four times as likely to be committed as white juveniles, Americans Indian juveniles were more than three times as likely, and Hispanic juveniles were 61 percent more likely. Another measurement of disproportionate minority confinement is to compare the committed population to the population of American youth.
Slightly more than 16 percent of American youth are African American. Between 2003 and 2013, the percentage of committed juveniles who were African American grew from 38 percent to 40 percent. Roughly 56 percent of all American youth are white (non-Hispanic). Between 2003 and 2013, the percent of committed juveniles who were white fell from 39 percent to 32 percent.
April 2, 2016 in Data on sentencing, Detailed sentencing data, Offender Characteristics, Prisons and prisoners, Race, Class, and Gender, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Extraordinany (and extraordinarily timely) issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
The March 2016 issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science has an extraordinary collections of essays by an extraordinary array of legal scholars and sociologists and criminologists under the issue title "The Great Experiment: Realigning Criminal Justice in California and Beyond." Though many of the articles focus on California's unique and uniquely important recent criminal justice reforms experiences, all folks interested in and concerned about sentencing and corrections reform in the United States ought to find the time to read most or all of the articles in this collection.
The special editors of this issue, Charis Kubrin and Carroll Seron, authored this introduction to the collection under the title "The Prospects and Perils of Ending Mass Incarceration in the United States." Here is an excerpt from that introduction:
This volume of The ANNALS represents the first effort by scholars to systematically and scientifically analyze what Joan Petersilia (2012) has described as "the biggest criminal justice experiment ever conducted in America." She went on to note that "most people don't even realize it's happening," a point underscored by Franklin Zimring in the volume's concluding remarks. At a historic moment in which imprisonment patterns across the U.S. are shifting for the first time in nearly 40 years, the California case is ripe for in-depth examination. The political landscape around decarceration is also shifting in ways that do not fit the debate of the last 40 years. The initiative behind the prison buildup was largely an offshoot of more conservative, law and order political agendas, but as the nation debates a move toward prison downsizing and decarceration, there is support from both the Left and the Right for this fundamental shift in policy (Aviram, this volume; Beckett et al., this volume) — unusual bedfellows at a time of political polarization. While this political convergence will no doubt be contested, as Joan Petersilia emphasizes in the volume's preface, it nonetheless represents an important moment to have a systematic, rigorous, and scientific evaluation of California's experiment and its implications on hand for policy-makers.
March 31, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Recommended reading, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Harvard Law School launches "Fair Punishment Project"
While I was on the road yesterday, I received an email with some exciting news from my law school alma mater. Here is the text of the email announcement:
We'd like to introduce you to a brand new initiative brought to you by Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston for Race & Justice and its Criminal Justice Institute called the Fair Punishment Project (FPP). The Fair Punishment Project will use legal research and educational initiatives to ensure that the U.S. justice system is fair and accountable. The Project will work to highlight the gross injustices resulting from prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective defense lawyers, and racial bias and exclusion. We are dedicated to illuminating the laws that result in excessive punishment, especially the death penalty and juvenile life without parole.
We'll be releasing our first report in the next day or two, so keep an eye out -- you don't want to miss it. Future reports will highlight the troubling attributes that outlier death penalty counties have in common, examine America's top 10 deadliest prosecutors, and look deeply into counties that are plagued by prosecutorial misconduct.
The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute was launched in 2005 by Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. The Institute serves as a critical bridge between scholarship, law, policy, and practice to solve the challenges of a multi-racial society. The Criminal Justice Institute trains Harvard Law School students who will be the next generation of ethical, effective, and passionate defense lawyers. Led by Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., the Institute leads research of the criminal and juvenile justice systems in order to affect local and national reform.
The Fair Punishment Project will strive to be a valuable resource for anyone and everyone who is interested in bringing about a fair and equitable justice system. We hope you will visit our website at www.fairpunishment.org to learn more about our work, and that you will join us as we address one of the most critical issues of our time.
And here are titles and links to some of the notable sentencing-related content already up at the FPP website:
What "The Ferguson Effect", Crack Babies, & Superpredators Have in Common
- Life Without Parole – From Bad Lawyers to No Lawyer At All
- Report Finds Juvenile LWOP Sentences Concentrated in a Few Counties, Disproportionately Impact Youth of Color
March 30, 2016 in Death Penalty Reforms, Prisons and prisoners, Race, Class, and Gender, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
"Sentencing Reductions versus Sentencing Equality"
The title of this post is the title of this interesting and timely new paper by Susan Klein now available via SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 was enacted by an odd conglomeration of Democrat and Republican who agreed that federal sentences should be based upon relevant offender and offense characteristics, not including such things as race, gender, geography, ideological bent of the sentencing judge, or citizenship. That goal has become lost and less relevant in today's world of draconian and mandatory minimum sentencing, especially in the drug trafficking, child pornography, and fraud arenas. Mass incarceration has run rampant. Sentences are so out-of-whack with most basic principles justice that the fact that female offenders may receive slightly lower prison terms than their male counterparts should no longer be the very top of our reform agenda.
This is not to suggest that scholars and the public shouldn't be concerned with sentencing disparity, especially based on race. However, the disparity between federal and state sentences is so much wider (and occurs so much more frequently) than the disparity among similarly-situated federal offenders that the latter appears less of a significant issue in absolute terms. Whatever reform capital policy-makers and scholars retain should be poured into championing alternatives to criminalization (such as fines, drug treatment, and apologies) and alternatives to long prison terms (such as probation and parole). Reforms must focus on discovering what offenses we could safely decriminalize, and what programs are effective in keeping individuals out of prison in the first place (or in curbing recidivism once incarceration has occurred).
If giving judges more discretion at sentencing means lower average prison terms, this will probably rebound to the benefit of our minority populations as a whole, even if it might mean that in particular cases minority defendants receive slightly higher sentences for the same conduct as their white counterparts. Likewise, if sentencing, parole, and probation decisions based upon "risk assessment" leads to lower overall incarceration rates, we may have to tolerate this even if it generates higher risk numbers for certain minority offenders. Critics of every substantive criminal-law and sentencing reform proposal need to remember the big picture, and not lose sight of the forest of mass incarceration for the trees of unwarranted sentencing disparity.
March 30, 2016 in Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered | Permalink | Comments (1)
Monday, March 28, 2016
Call for Papers for Symposium on "Private Prisons: The Corporatization of Criminal Justice and the New Marketplace for Crime"
I am very pleased to be able to post a timely call for papers sent my way by a former student who is now in law teaching and working hard in the arena of criminal justice reform and sentencing. Here are the event/paper details sent my way:
Indiana Tech Law School will dedicate its 2016 Annual Symposium to the pressing issue of the prison industrial complex, and specifically the role of private prisons in mass incarceration. The symposium, titled Private Prisons: The Corporatization of Criminal Justice and the New Marketplace for Crime, will seek to contextualize the criminal justice system against the backdrop of the for-profit prison system, particularly the system's reliance upon high rates of incarceration to sustain its business model. The symposium seeks to address a broad range of questions, including how the profit-motive of private prisons influences the length and severity of sentences and availability of parole, how private prisons and mass incarceration disproportionately impact communities of color, and how private prisons contribute to social inequality and oppression.
The United States imprisons more people, both per capita and in absolute terms, than any other nation in the world. Since the 1980's, the government has increasingly turned to private corporations to build, maintain, and operate prisons to house the burgeoning prison population. This unprecedented level of incarceration by for-profit corporations has important implications for law and policy, not only in the context of criminal justice but also in immigration detainment and deportation matters. Currently, forprofit prisons detain 6% of state prisoners, 16% of federal prisoners, and nearly half of all immigrants detained for documentation status.
The private prison system raises issues that touch upon criminal sentencing, immigration policy, the legitimacy of delegating carceral policy to the private sector, and fundamental liberty guarantees under the Fourteenth Amendment. We seek papers that will contribute to the important dialogue about the legal system's responsibility for both producing and correcting these outcomes. Papers accepted for the symposium will be published in a special symposium edition of the Indiana Tech Law Review.
Workshop Contacts: andré douglas pond cummings (ADCummings @ indianatech.edu), Adam Lamparello (AXLamparello @ indianatech.edu) and Yvonne Lindgren (YFLindgren @ indianatech.edu)
Submission procedure: Email a proposal of up to 500 words as a Word or PDF document by May 1, 2016. Please include your name, institution, and contact information in the proposal and submit it via email to Lydia LaMont (firstname.lastname@example.com) with the subject line "Symposium Call for Papers." Decisions will be made by June 1st and working paper drafts are due by October 15th.
Symposium Details: The Symposium will be held at Indiana Tech Law School in Fort Wayne, Indiana on November 11th. The program will consist of panel discussions and a keynote address.
March 28, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (0)
Friday, March 25, 2016
"Poor white kids are less likely to go to prison than rich black kids"
The title of this post is the headline of this Wonkblog posting via the Washington Post discussing some recent empirical research on sentencing outcomes appearing in the latest issue of the journal Race & Social Problems. Here is the post's discussion of the research:
It's a fact that people of color are worse off than white Americans in all kinds of ways, but there is little agreement on why. Some see those disparities as a consequence of racial discrimination in schools, the courts and the workplace, both in the past and present. Others argue that economic inequalities are really the cause, and that public policy should help the poor no matter their race or ethnicity. When it comes to affirmative action in college admissions, for example, many say that children from poor, white families should receive preferential treatment, as well.
In some ways, though, discrimination against people of color is more complicated and fundamental than economic inequality. A stark new finding epitomizes that reality: In recent decades, rich black kids have been more likely to go to prison than poor white kids. "Race trumps class, at least when it comes to incarceration," said Darrick Hamilton of the New School, one of the researchers who produced the study.
He and his colleagues, Khaing Zaw and William Darity of Duke University, examined data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a national study that began in 1979 and followed a group of young people into adulthood and middle age. The participants were asked about their assets and debts, and interviewers also noted their type of residence, including whether they were in a jail or prison.
The researchers grouped participants in the survey by their race and their household wealth as of 1985 and then looked back through the data to see how many people in each group ultimately went to prison. Participants who were briefly locked up between interviews might not be included in their calculations of the share who were eventually incarcerated.
About 2.7 percent of the poorest white young people — those whose household wealth was in the poorest 10th of the distribution in 1985, when they were between 20 and 28 years old — ultimately went to prison. In the next 10th, 3.1 percent ultimately went to prison.
The households of young people in both of these groups had more debts than assets. In other words, their wealth was negative. All the same, their chances of being imprisoned were far less than those of black youth from much more affluent circumstances. About 10 percent of affluent black youths in 1985 would eventually go to prison. Only the very wealthiest black youth — those whose household wealth in 1985 exceeded $69,000 in 2012 dollars — had a better chance of avoiding prison than the poorest white youth. Among black young people in this group, 2.4 percent were incarcerated.
Hispanic participants who were less affluent in 1985 were more likely to be eventually incarcerated than their white peers with similar wealth, but less likely than black participants....
It could be that the white participants in the study still had other advantages over their black peers, even if they had been incarcerated. Perhaps they went to better schools, or lived in areas where it was easier to find work. At the same time, another reason for the disparity between black and white wealth could be that employers make negative inferences about black workers' pasts, even those who have never been to prison....
In a way, untangling economic and racial inequalities is a chicken-and-egg problem. In criminal justice, though, you can't just explain away the disproportionate rates at which black and Hispanic youths end up in prison by pointing out that many people of color did not grow up with the same economic advantages as their white peers.
The full research article discussed here, which is titled "Race, Wealth and Incarceration: Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth," can be accessed at this link.
March 25, 2016 in Offender Characteristics, Prisons and prisoners, Race, Class, and Gender, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (1)
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Pew develops new "punishment rate" metric to provide more nuanced perspective on state incarceration levels
Via email today I learned of this intriguing new report from the folks at Pew Trusts titled "The Punishment Rate: New metric evaluates prison use relative to reported crime." Here is the short data-heavy report starts and ends:
Researchers, policymakers, and the public rely on a variety of statistics to measure how society punishes crime. Among the most common is the imprisonment rate — the number of people in prison per 100,000 residents. This metric allows for comparisons of prison use over time and across jurisdictions and is widely seen as a proxy for punishment. States with high imprisonment rates, for example, are considered more punitive than those with low rates.
A more nuanced assessment of punishment than the ratio of inmates to residents is that of inmates to crime— what The Pew Charitable Trusts calls the "punishment rate." This new metric gauges the size of the prison population relative to the frequency and severity of crime reported in each jurisdiction, putting the imprisonment rate in a broader context.
Using the punishment rate to examine the U.S. criminal justice system, Pew found that all states became more punitive from 1983 to 2013, even though they varied widely in the amount of punishment they imposed. The analysis also shows that the nation as a whole has become more punitive than the imprisonment rate alone indicates....
The long-term rise in U.S. imprisonment is a familiar story. Although the imprisonment rate is an essential tool in understanding correctional trends, it paints an incomplete picture of the nation's and individual states' punitiveness because it does not take crime rates into account. The punishment rate provides a more nuanced assessment by placing each jurisdiction's imprisonment rate in the context of the severity and frequency of its crime.
Analysis of punishment rates over time and across jurisdictions makes clear that the nation has become more punitive. What's more, many states punish crime significantly more—or less—than their imprisonment rates alone indicate. States with particularly high or low punishment rates and those that experienced significant increases in their punishment rates over time may benefit from identifying and examining the policy choices responsible for their rankings and trends.
Helpfully, the folks at The Marshall Project have this interesting piece discussing what the new Pew metric does and does not tell us. That piece is headlined "The Tricky Business of Measuring Crime and Punishment: Pew researchers release a new prison scorecard, but it ain't perfect," and here are excerpts:
We've grown accustomed to a quantified world of ever more complicated data available at our fingertips, on everything from how we sleep and eat to how often left-handed pinch hitters hit ground rule doubles on rainy days. "The incredible databases of what we have for sports just blow away anything there is in criminal justice. It's kind of crazy," said Adam Gelb, director of Pew's Public Safety Performance Project, adding, "We can't answer some of the most basic questions about one of the most important functions of a society."
Nearly five years ago, Gelb and Pew started by looking at recidivism — how often people released from prisons are arrested again for new offenses. But using recidivism alone to compare how states are doing at rehabilitating prisoners fell short. One state could have a lower recidivism rate simply because it tended to have more low risk offenders in its prisons. So then, Gelb said he began thinking about how to assess whether the "right" people are in prison, that is the serious, violent and repeat offenders most likely to commit new crimes.
Pew's punishment rate focuses on the most serious felony offenses that lead to a year or more in state prison. The calculation divides each state's imprisonment rate in a given year by the rate of crimes reported there, using the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting system. To account for some crimes being more serious and more likely to lead to longer prison sentences, Pew weights the annual crime rates by calculating the average time served for those crimes each year. After all of these calculations, Pew found that as America's imprisonment rate has gone up in the past three decades and as crime has dropped, the "punishment rate" rose by 165 percent.
While the methodology makes sense and is probably the best available considering the shortcomings of federal crime data, the punishment rate is not yet the magic metric. Unpacking the components of Pew's punishment rate illustrates how tricky measuring criminal justice progress can be. The punishment rate depends on the number of crimes reported by the FBI. But the Uniform Crime Report, created in the 1920s, tracks only seven key crimes: murder, assault, rape, robbery, arson, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft. It excludes dozens of offenses — most notably drug crimes, which have been a major factor in the growth of prison populations. Pew's report readily acknowledges that the Uniform Crime Report omits crimes for which roughly one-fifth of state prisoners are serving time.
"What that means is not to say that drug trafficking is not a serious crime, just that it's not reported and tracked in a way that you can support adding it to this formula," Gelb said. "It does mean that — other things being equal — a state that has a lot of drug enforcement activity and stiff sentencing for drug offenses will have a higher punishment rate."
The other trouble with the punishment rate is in the lag between crime and judgment. Pew is comparing the crime rate each year to the current prison population at that moment. It doesn't account for the people being sentenced each year or the prison intakes. It also doesn't look at what crimes those in prison were convicted of. So there is an inherent lag between when crimes happen and when someone might go to prison for them. Despite plummeting crime since the 1990s, the growth in the punishment rate didn't overtake the rise in imprisonment until 2011. That may be partially explained by the gap in time between crime and incarceration, though Gelb contends that effect is ameliorated by calculating rolling averages for offense severity (but not the crimes themselves or the imprisonment rate). He said the adjustment is meant to be a barometer of the seriousness of crimes in a year rather than a "fine-tuned calculation." But that lack of precision could undercut Pew's implicit argument that in some states we are "punishing for punishment's sake."
I find especially important and notable Gelb's astute comment that the "incredible databases of what we have for sports just blow away anything there is in criminal justice." Especially as I am starting to prepare for my upcoming fantasy baseball draft, it is more than a bit disconcerting that I can easily find dozens of statistical projections for the Cleveland Indians' battery but no on-line sources to help predict how many batteries might be committed in Cleveland.
March 24, 2016 in Data on sentencing, Detailed sentencing data, Prisons and prisoners, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (4)
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
"Looking Forward: A Comprehensive Plan for Criminal Justice Reform in Ohio"
The title of this post is the title of this notable new report produced by the ACLU of Ohio and the Ohio Justice and Policy Center. Here is the report's introduction:
Ohio has a mass incarceration crisis. There are currently 50,600 Ohioans in prisons designed to hold 38,600; that's at least 12,000 too many of our neighbors and fellow citizens in cages. And beyond these inhumane numbers, there is a fundamental misuse of criminal-justice tools to attack social and health problems. We have responded to poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, or an overall lack of opportunities with punishment.
Instead of treating people with mental illness, we criminalize them and block access to the care they so desperately need. We allow low-income people to be victimized by steep fines and costs, with many languishing in local jails because they cannot afford to pay a court fine or make bond. People who have a small amount of drugs are not given treatment for their addiction, but instead offered prison sentences and a felony conviction. Those who try to re-enter society have the door slammed shut by mounting collateral sanctions that prevent them from getting a job, housing, education, reliable transportation, and more.
The result is a system that is costing our state in every sense of the word. Ohio has the sixth largest prison population in the nation. In the last decade, the prison population has increased 12 percent despite the fact that the violent crime rate has reached a 30-year low. In 2014, taxpayers spent over $1.7 billion to operate the state prison system alone. Every dollar spent on prisons is a dollar not spent on crime-survivor services, schools, addiction treatment, mental healthcare and other services that enrich our communities and that keep people out of the criminal justice system in the first place. Nowhere are the negative effects of mass incarceration felt more than in communities of color. African Americans account for nearly half the state's prison population but only a little more than a tenth of the total state population. Mass incarceration has decimated neighborhoods, leaving many communities of color with countless people unable to find employment and cycling in and out of the justice system.
State leaders have begun to recognize that mass incarceration is simply not working and must be dismantled. In 2011, a bi-partisan group of legislators, along with advocates and activists, passed House Bill 86 (HB 86). This legislation was part of the federal Justice Reinvestment Initiative that sought to reform state criminal justice systems and provide resources for strategies that depopulate prisons and jails. While HB 86 promised modest reforms, it was never fully implemented or funded, and despite a short plateau, Ohio's prison population is growing.
The time for modest, incremental steps is over. We must challenge ourselves to imagine a fundamentally different justice system that is truly just, and not merely focused on punishment. We must usher in an era of being smart on crime, not just tough on crime, where accountability does not mean punishment for punishment's sake. We can create forms of accountability that restore the law-breaker to being a productive member of society while also offering more robust healing and restoration to crime victims.
Currently, the Ohio General Assembly has created a Criminal Justice Recodification Committee that is tasked with rewriting our criminal laws. Once again, state leaders have invited members of that committee to use this opportunity to change our justice system. However, the problem does not begin or end simply with the contents of Ohio's criminal code, nor does the solution reside solely with the Committee. Their work represents a meaningful opportunity to bring about substantive reform — that opportunity must not be squandered on narrow, technical edits to statutory language. Now is the chance for the legislature to precisely identify and fundamentally change the policies that drive excessive incarceration. It is with this approach that we can perhaps finally begin looking forward to a new justice system that makes our communities stronger and lifts up the people of Ohio, rather than keeping them down.
March 22, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, State Sentencing Guidelines | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Thoughtful nuanced comments from George Will on modern crime and punishment
The Washington Post has published this astute new commentary by Geoge Will under the headline "Sentencing reform alone won't fix crime and punishment in America." I recommend the full piece, and here is how it starts and ends:
Sen. John Cornyn recalls visiting a Texas prison where some inmates taking shop classes could not read tape measures. Cornyn, who was previously a district court judge and Texas Supreme Court justice, knows that prisons are trying to teach literacy and vocations, trying to cope with the mental illnesses of many inmates and trying to take prophylactic measures to prevent drug-related recidivism by people imprisoned for drug offenses. "The criminal-justice system," he says, "has become by default a social services provider."
It is not, however, equipped to perform so many functions. Cornyn, a Republican, is part of a bipartisan congressional group negotiating sentencing reform, one of many needed repairs of the criminal-justice system. What justice requires, frugality encourages: Too many people are in prison for too long, and too often, at a financial cost disproportionate to the enhancement of public safety....
Old theories about the causes of crime need to be rethought. During the Great Depression, unemployment soared to 25 percent, yet in many cities crime fell. Demographic factors? Crime rates often vary with the size of society's cohort of young males: Crime declined considerably during World War II not just, or even primarily, because unemployment was negligible but also because so many young males were in military discipline.
In 2010, one year after the Great Recession's jobs destruction doubled the unemployment rate, the property crime rate fell and violent crime reached a 40-year low. Current high incarceration rates had something to do with that. But how much? James Q. Wilson, the most accomplished social scientist since World War II, accepted the estimate that increased incarceration explains "one-quarter or more of the crime decline." Wilson also suggested an environmental factor: "For decades, doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent and delinquent." Since the 1970s, lead has been removed from gasoline and paint for new homes, and "the amount of lead in Americans' blood fell by four-fifths between 1975 and 1991." Wilson cited a study that ascribed more than half the 1990s' decline in crime to the reduction of gasoline lead. Clearly, sentencing reform is just one piece of a complex policy puzzle.
March 17, 2016 in National and State Crime Data, Prisons and prisoners, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (2)
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
"The Emerging Eighth Amendment Consensus Against Life Without Parole Sentences for Nonviolent Offenses"
The title of this post is the title of this article authored by Bidish Sarma and Sophie Cull recently posted on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
As the nation moves away from the policies that built a criminal justice system bent on mass incarceration, it is an appropriate time to reassess a sentencing regime that has doomed thousands of individuals convicted of nonviolent offenses to die in prison. Over the last thirty years, those policies have resulted in more than 3,000 offenders across the country receiving life sentences without the possibility of parole when they were convicted of a nonviolent crime. While it seems clear to many today that this harsh punishment is inappropriate for offenses that involved no physical harm to other people, the individuals serving these sentences continue to face life and death in prison. The Eighth Amendment offers these offenders an opportunity to demonstrate the unconstitutionality of their punishment to the Supreme Court — the institution in the best position to redress these excessive sentences of a bygone era.
This Article analyzes the claim that there is a national consensus against life without parole sentences for individuals convicted of non-violent offenses. First, it defines the problem, exploring how and why some offenders received life without parole sentences for nonviolent crime. This entails a look at the historical development of a series of harsh sentencing policies that made nonviolent offenses punishable by life without the possibility of parole. The historical developments are then traced through to current times to explain the seismic shift in how leaders in all three branches of government approach punishing low-level and nonviolent crimes.
This Article situates the punishment in the Eighth Amendment context. How have the Supreme Court's previous Eighth Amendment rulings framed the relevant constitutional questions? And how can a change in the way the Court considers the link between the nature of the offense and the challenged punishment create new possibilities? This Article explores how treating individuals sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent offenses as a discrete category based on the nature of the crimes can alter the Eighth Amendment framework that the Court will use to determine the punishment's constitutionality. The unfavorable "gross disproportionality" cases that have previously been considered by the Court do not need to govern the claim and, therefore, do not foreclose the possibility that the Constitution itself prohibits these sentences.
After exploring how to understand the constitutional claim in a way that brings the Supreme Court's categorical approach to bear (rather than the gross disproportionality approach), this Article assesses the factors the Court considers in its consensus-based categorical test. It sets out, and then evaluates, the various indicators of consensus upon which the Court relies: the number of jurisdictions that legislatively authorize a punishment; the number of sentences actually imposed; and the degree of geographic isolation. It also evaluates the various considerations that assist the Court in making an independent judgment of the punishment. Ultimately, based on binding Eighth Amendment precedent, sufficient evidence is available now to enable the Court to strike down life without parole sentences for nonviolent offenses. In other words, there is an emerging consensus that the Court should recognize.
March 16, 2016 in Offense Characteristics, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (6)
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Interesting account of effort to take sentencing reform directly to voters in Oklahoma
This article from The Frontier provides an interesting account of sentencing reform efforts in Oklahoma and why supporters of reform are turning to direct democracy to move forward. The piece is headlined "After several stalled attempts, Oklahoma group taking prison reforms to vote of the people," and here are excerpts:
Kris Steele stepped up to the microphone in a packed room at Tulsa's Women in Recovery office and declared this time, in 2016, Oklahoma was going to break through the "political gridlock" by taking criminal justice reform to a vote of the people....
For more than five years, Steele, a former speaker of the state House of Representatives, has been talking about the importance of criminal justice reform for Oklahoma's fiscal bottom line, its citizens and children. Now, facing a $1.3 billion budget crisis and prisons packed above 120 percent of capacity, it appears Oklahoma is finally ready to listen.
Steele, along with a bipartisan coalition of state power players, is hoping Oklahoma voters will accomplish what elected officials did not in several prior attempts: reducing the state's staggering prison population. They hope to redirect some of the savings toward addressing root causes of crime, shifting the state toward a corrections system that focuses on rehabilitation, not solely punishment.
As chairman of Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform, Steele is leading efforts to collect more than 65,000 petition signatures that would allow two state questions to be added to November's ballot. State question 780 would reclassify certain low-level offenses as misdemeanors instead of felonies, such as drug possession and smaller property crimes. The idea is that reclassification would reduce Oklahoma's prison population and trigger cost savings, badly needed in a state facing a budget crisis where leaders are considering trimming school days to make ends meet.
State question 781 would then invest those prison cost savings in programs designed to address the root causes of crime — including addiction, mental health issues and poverty — and programs that provide job training and education to offenders as they leave prison....
Other states, including Texas and North Carolina, have used their own Justice Reinvestment Initiatives to realize significant savings on corrections spending. North Carolina's reforms, passed in 2011, have helped the state close nine prisons and officials expect to save $560 million in averted costs and cumulative savings by 2017, according to the Council on State Governments. Those savings have also made it possible for North Carolina to re-invest nearly $4 million into community-based treatment programs, the council reported.
After Texas officials implemented sentencing reforms in 2007, including probation, drug treatment, pre-trial diversion programs and intermediate sanction facilities, cost savings from the measures allowed Texas to close three existing prisons and scrap plans to build three new ones.
As Oklahoma has watched other states — including Texas — implement those reforms, the political climate surrounding criminal justice reform here has changed, Steele told The Frontier in an interview. Steele, who left office due to term limits, became the executive director of The Education and Employment Ministry in Oklahoma City.
"When we first started having this conversation in 2009 to 2011, our prisons were at 99 percent capacity. Now, they're over 122 percent capacity," he said. "The fact that the problem has not gone away — in fact, it's gotten worse — causes us to be more willing to have this conversation."...
"I think the public is ready to have that conversation. I think the public is way ahead of the legislature on this issue. There's actually a pretty significant disconnect between the voters and elected officials on this issue." Hence taking the issue to the voters through the two state questions....
Now several bills in the legislature aim to achieve similar goals of the two state questions backed by Oklahomans for Criminal Justice reform. But Steele's group wants to put the decision directly in the hands of voters. And he's got the backing of organizations like Right on Crime and the ACLU of Oklahoma.
"It's a little more work, but in the end we think it's going to be well worth it," he said. "The people of Oklahoma ought to be able to have a direct say so in this issue." It is the citizens who pay the $500 million each year to fund Oklahoma's prison system, after all.
The Rev. Ray Owens, pastor of Tulsa's Metropolitan Baptist Church, was one who offered an "amen" after Steele and Neal spoke to the crowd at Women in Recovery last week. "Instead of investing more money in prisons, I believe it's time for us to invest more in our people," Owens said.
March 15, 2016 in Scope of Imprisonment, State Sentencing Guidelines, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (0)
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Notable example of "prison industrial complex" using "phony-baloney numbers" to grow or protect its budget
Bill Otis here at Crime & Consequences flagged this interesting local article from Indiana headlined "Prison officials say lighter sentences aren't saving money." The article discusses a report issued by the Indiana Department of Correction asserting that "costs have more than tripled since it began diverting low-level offenders out of state prisons and back into their communities" as a result of a sentencing reform law enacted in 2014. Bill seems to think this article reveals that sentencing reforms do not deliver on promised cost savings, but a read of the full article (and not just the parts highlighted by Bill) reveals that some funny math is behind the latest cost claims now coming from the Indiana DOC:
Senate Judiciary Chairman Brent Steele, R-Bedford, calls it "ridiculous" and says the report contains "phony-baloney numbers."
Lawmakers who pushed to lower penalties for drug-related crimes, such as drug possession and theft, vowed to return anticipated savings from prison costs to communities for treatment programs, community corrections and local lock-ups. But, according to the department's report, there's no money to send. This despite a reduction in the prison population of more than 5,000 inmates – a 17 percent drop - since the law went into effect in July 2014....
Corrections officials say the new law will cost an additional $400,000 in the first six months of this year - for jail costs alone. That expense is expected to climb before the year's end. That's because the state spends about $35 a day to house a convicted, low-level offender in a county jail, according to the Correction Department report. The department claims it can house the same inmate in a prison for just under $10 a day.
Steele and other lawmakers who were deeply involved in crafting the sentencing reform law are irked by those claims. Two years ago, when Correction Department officials asked lawmakers for money, they reported it cost about $60 a day to house a state prisoner.
A year ago, prison officials said they needed an additional $51 million to build a new state prison. Steele and others rejected the proposal, predicting that the state would be able to close a prison – and save millions – as sentencing reform took hold. Steele said the department now is refusing to cooperate with the intent of the sentencing reform law.
Corrections officials don't see it that way. The department's legislative director, Jon Ferguson, said the $10-a-day rate used in the report is a "marginal per diem" that doesn't include the fixed, operational costs associated with running big prisons. And the number of those prison facilities the state operates hasn't gone down since the sentencing reform law was put into place.
Promised savings from sentencing reform was key to getting it passed and to winning support from sheriffs, judges and local officials who feared it presented another unfunded mandate by the state. The Legislature set aside an initial $60 million for communities to offset initial costs. But lawmakers assured critics that the sentencing reform would eventually pay for itself.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Greg Steuerwald, R-Avon, who helped craft the sentencing reform law with Steele, also questioned the validity of the Corrections Department's report. But, he noted, "We're in a transition year." "I expect to see much different numbers by next year," he said.
March 12, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Rep Lamar Smith makes case against federal sentencing reform by questioning success of Texas reforms
One recurring theme of many advocates for federal sentencing reform is that state-level reforms, lead notably by Texas, have been successful at reducing incarceration levels without seeing an increase in crime. But at the end of this new Washington Times commentary, headlined "How weak prison terms endanger the innocent: Mandatory minimums keep the guilty behind bars to pay their debt to society," US House Representative Lamar Smith from Texas questions whether Texas reforms have truly been effective. Here are some notable excerpts from the piece:
Congress should be wary of reducing federal prison sentences. Unfortunately, much of the discussion on sentencing laws has focused on the criminals. What about the victims of their crimes? What about the dangers of putting these offenders back out on the streets where many prey again on law-abiding citizens?
The lives and property of innocent Americans are at stake. Past experience should persuade us not to weaken penalties, which could lead to thousands of dangerous criminals being released into our communities....
Supporters of lower prison sentences also argue that judges need more discretion. They say that a one-size-fits-all penalty does not allow for consideration of mitigating factors, which might be necessary to determine a fair sentence.
But prior experience with judicial discretion in sentencing counters this claim. It is exactly the problem of too much discretion in the hands of activist judges that fueled the decades-long crime wave that preceded mandatory minimum sentences. Furthermore, judicial discretion led to widespread discrepancies in sentences, even when the circumstances were similar.
The minimum sentencing structure ensures that judges apply a uniform penalty based on the crime, not on the judge's subjective opinion. Criminals receive equal punishment for equal crimes. And the removal of hardened criminals from our streets for longer periods of time helps make our neighborhoods safer....
In my home state of Texas, new policies sought to reduce incarceration time and focus resources on treatment and post-release supervision. Yet almost one-quarter of inmates released have been rearrested and sent back to prison within three years. Early release programs don't appear to be working.
Mandatory minimums help keep these individuals behind bars where they belong. That's one explanation for why crime rates remain down. The purpose of criminal law is to punish bad behavior, deter criminal acts and protect the American people. Releasing prisoners too soon could condemn many Americans to becoming victims of violence. This can be avoided if prisoners are not released before their sentences have been served.
March 10, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered | Permalink | Comments (3)
Wednesday, March 09, 2016
US Sentencing Commission released big new and timely report on "Recidivism Among Federal Offenders"
I just received via e-mail an alert concerning an important new publication by the US Sentencing Commission, and here is the full text of the email with links from the original:
Today, the United States Sentencing Commission issued a report on the recidivism of federal offenders. The study is groundbreaking in both its breadth—studying all 25,431 U.S. citizen federal offenders released in 2005, and in its duration—following the releasees over an eight year period. News release.
The Commission found that nearly half (49.3%) of offenders released from prison or placed on a term of probation in 2005 were rearrested within eight years for either a new crime or for some other violation of the technical conditions of their probation or release. Summary and key findings.
The Commission also found that:
- Most offenders who recidivated did so within the first two years of the follow up period;
- Assault was the most common serious rearrest offense but most rearrest offenses were non-violent in nature;
- An offender's criminal history as calculated under the federal sentencing guidelines was closely correlated with recidivism rates (rearrest rates ranged from 34% for offenders in the lowest criminal history category to 80% for offenders in the highest criminal history category);
- An offender's age at the time of release was also closely correlated with recidivism (rearrest rates ranged from 67% for offenders younger than 21 to 16% for offenders older than 60).
I am going to need some time to really dig into this document to assess what it could and should mean for on-going debates over federal sentencing reforms. But even before I do a deep dive, I am eager to robustly compliment the Commission for producing such a data-rich and timely report for the benefit of everyone thinking about the current state and future direction of the federal sentencing system.
March 9, 2016 in Data on sentencing, Detailed sentencing data, Prisons and prisoners, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Saturday, March 05, 2016
"From Mass Incarceration to Mass Control, and Back Again: How Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform May Lead to a For-Profit Nightmare"
The title of this post is the title of this notable new and timely article now available via SSRN and authored by Carl Takei. Here is the abstract:
Since 2010, advocates on the right and left have increasingly allied to denounce mass incarceration and propose serious reductions in the use of prisons. This alliance serves useful shared purposes, but each side comes to it with distinct and in many ways incompatible long-term interests. I f progressive advocates rely solely on this alliance without aggressively building our own vision of what decarceration should look like, the unintended consequences could be serious.
This Article describes the current mass incarceration paradigm and current left-right reform efforts. It then outlines how, if progressives do not set clear goals for what should replace mass incarceration, these bipartisan efforts risk creating a nightmare scenario of mass control, surveillance, and monitoring of Black and Brown communities. Finally, the Article explains why this mass control paradigm would lay the groundwork for a heavily-privatized, extraordinarily difficult-to-end resurgence of mass incarceration in subsequent decades.
March 5, 2016 in Mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Recommended reading, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (7)
Thursday, March 03, 2016
Indiana county prosecutor seeks re-election by bragging about "proudly over-crowding our prisons"
As reported in this Reason blog posting, a local prosecutor in Indiana is pursuing reelection by bragging about being proud to overcrowd the state's prisons. The full headline of the posting, along with the picture, provides the essentials of this notable story: "Indiana Prosecutor Bradley Cooper Is 'Proudly Over-Crowding our Prisons': Cooper's new campaign flyer brags about the people he's put in prison for decades over drug sales and minor theft." Here is more from the blog post about this local prosecutor and his record:
As American conservatives and liberals alike embrace criminal justice reform, those opposed are blatantly bragging about their overcriminalization agendas. One particularly gross example: a new campaign mailer from Johnson County, Indiana, Prosecutor Bradley D. Cooper, which announces that he has been busy "proudly over-crowding our prisons."
The flyer also features mugshots from convicted criminals, along with what they were found guilty of and what prison sentence they were given. It includes a man who was sentenced to 40 years in prison for selling meth, a man convicted of manslaughter who died while in prison, and a man who received a 40-year sentence for burglary.
In the latter case, William A. Russell was arrested after breaking into someone's home and stealing $52. For that offense, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. A trial court also determined that he was a "habitual offender," which qualified him for a sentencing enhancement of 20 years.
Another of the offenders featured is Amanda Smith, a schizophrenic woman who drowned her son in 2012 while he was on a court-ordered overnight visit from foster care; she claimed it was God's will and turned herself in immediately afterward. Smith's lawyers argued for her to be sent to a state mental hospital, but a judge sentenced her to 55 years in state prison instead.
Last year, Cooper made a fuss that a man accused of forcible rape was only eligible to receive 63 years behind bars, pursuant to a 2014 change to Indiana's criminal code. Previously, the man could have received a maximum sentence of 168 years in prison. Cooper called the sentencing-reform measure the "hug a thug" law and accused the state of coddling violent criminals.
For more about this local prosecutor professional history and accomplishments, his office's website includes this bio and this resume for Bradley D. Cooper. Interestingly, I believe that Prosecutor Bradley attended the same law school as frequent blog commentor federalist, and thus I would be especially eager to hear from federalist (or others) whether they think this kind of campaign slogan is unsavory or perhaps even unethical.
March 3, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (8)
Wednesday, March 02, 2016
Mark Holden, GC at Koch Industries, makes "The Factual Case for Criminal Justice Reform"
As regular readers know, various groups and persons associated with the wealthy and politically active Koch brothers have been very supportive of state and federal sentencing reform efforts. Continuing in that tradition, Mark Holden, who is senior vice president and general counsel at Koch Industries, Inc., has authored this new Medium commentary titled "The Factual Case for Criminal Justice Reform." I recommend the piece is full (with all its links), and here are excerpts:
These days, it's hard to find legislation in Washington, D.C. that has bipartisan support. It's even harder to find legislation that will help people improve their lives instead of making their lives worse.
Yet that's exactly what both houses of Congress are currently doing through criminal justice reform legislation. The Senate is considering the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. It contains a series of long overdue reforms that have been tried at the state level and have been proven to reduce crime, lower spending on incarceration, reduce incarceration rates, and give people a better chance at leading a productive and fulfilling life once they're released from prison.
There's little doubt that the current system is dysfunctional. American criminal justice is too often inconsistent with the promises of the Bill of Rights. We have a two-tiered system, with the wealthy and the well-connected experiencing a much better system than the poor, oftentimes regardless of guilt or innocence. A growing number of Americans recognize this — nearly 80 percent of the country supports reform. So do many prosecutors and judges. For example, liberal federal Judge Rakoff of the Southern District of New York and conservative Judge Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have raised awareness that innocent people are pleading guilty to crimes they didn't commit because they cannot effectively defend themselves against the power of the government. That is why calls for reform are growing so loud from both ends of the political spectrum that Congress can no longer ignore these problems, which have festered for more than three decades.
The numbers speak for themselves. Over the past decades more and more Americans are put behind bars, sometimes for crimes they didn't commit or with punishments that are not consistent with the crime. The result has been a skyrocketing prison population that ruins lives and wastes money. At the federal level alone, the number of prisoners has increased by 795 percent in the past 35 years. Federal and state spending on prisons also increased over this timeframe to $8 billion annually, which is 3 to 4 times more per capita than we spend on education. America is now the world's largest jailer, with only 5 percent of the world's population but a whopping 25 percent of the world's prisoners. And there are as many Americans with a college degree as there are Americans with a criminal record.
As more people get caught in this system, it breaks apart families, destabilizes communities, increases poverty, and makes it harder — if not impossible — for people to rejoin society after they've served their sentence. Why? Because criminal convictions are accompanied by countless collateral consequences that burden people for the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately, not everyone recognizes the need for reform. As demand for reform grows louder, the defenders of the status quo are mobilizing. Their argument is simple: Reforming the criminal justice system will endanger society and put people's lives at risk. But these claims have no basis in reality. In fact, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act will have the opposite effect.
Many of its most important provisions are modeled after successful reforms from states such as Georgia, Utah, Kentucky, and Texas. In the past decade, more than half of states have passed a variety of changes to their criminal justice systems. Some lowered mandatory minimums — non-negotiable sentences that can run into the decades — for low-level offenders. Others gave judges greater discretion in sentencing. And still more tried a variety of other worthwhile reforms, including prison reform and expungement of past criminal records so worthy individuals seeking redemption could put their past mistakes behind them and have a fresh start when leaving prison.
The results speak for themselves. While the federal imprisonment rate increased by 15 percent over the last decade, the state rate fell by 4 percent. This didn't lead to an increase in crime, either. No less than 32 states saw drops in both the percentage of people imprisoned and the overall crime rate. Put another way: Criminal justice reform made society safer.
We need federal reforms along the same lines. That's what the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act would do, which is why it has broad support from law enforcement. It contains a variety of reforms that would enhance public safety and make the criminal justice system more fair and humane....
Will lawmakers seize this opportunity to make people's lives better, or will they fall prey to fear-mongering? For the sake of the least fortunate in society, I certainly hope they make the right choice.
Some prior related posts on Koch family efforts in support of criminal justice reform:
- Koch Industries give "major grant" to NACDL to help with indigent defense
- Highlighting that George Soros and the Koch Brothers agree on the need for criminal justice reform
- Another sign of the modern sentencing times: notable sponsor for "How the Criminal Justice System Impacts Well-Being"
- ACLU to devote $50 million to political efforts to attack mass incarceration
- Big talk from Charles Koch about big (money) criminal justice reform efforts
- "Inside The Koch Campaign To Reform Criminal Justice"
- A test for the Kochs' influence: seeking justice and freedom for Weldon Angelos
- "Do the Koch Brothers Really Care About Criminal-Justice Reform?"
- Should there really be so much left-leaning distrust for the Koch brothers' criminal justice reform work?
- Charles Koch Institute produces great set of short videos urging crimnal justice reforms
March 2, 2016 in Aspects and impact of Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Tuesday, March 01, 2016
Former AG Mukasey delivers "clear" message to GOP on SRCA: "Law enforcement asks you to pass this bill."
The Hill has now published this notable new op-ed authored by Michael Mukasey and Ronal Serpas under the headline "Federal sentencing reform will aid law enforcement." Here are excerpts:
The Senate is back in session amid recent warnings from Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) that federal sentencing reform would jeopardize public safety. They say the country cannot risk reform.
As a former attorney general under President George W. Bush who has overseen thousands of prosecutions, and a police chief with three decades of experience, we have dedicated our lives to the safety of this country.
We can firmly say that sentencing reform done right will not harm public safety. In fact, it will enhance it. We were some of the original supporters of the 1990s "tough on crime" laws. After decades of enforcing them, we and our colleagues — police chiefs and U.S. attorneys — now recognize many provisions, like overly harsh sentencing, went too far.
Much has been learned in the last 25 years about who should be locked up and for how long. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act recalibrates sentencing policy to meet the needs of the 21st century. Lowering mandatory minimum sentences for low-level crimes will reduce unnecessary incarceration. This will allow us to better direct law enforcement resources to arresting, prosecuting, and punishing the most serious and violent criminals.
That's why we and 130 of our law enforcement colleagues wrote to congressional leadership urging them to pass the act. Those standing with us include two former U.S. attorneys general, two directors of the FBI, 21 sitting police chiefs and 68 former U.S. attorneys.
Our message to Republican leadership is clear: Law enforcement asks you to pass this bill. Targeted and appropriate sentencing is a superior approach to controlling crime....
The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act offers a better path forward. It would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for repeat nonviolent drug offenders. And it would allow judges more discretion to depart from mandatory minimums for low-level offenders if — after hearing specific circumstances of the crime — they feel it is appropriate.
Contrary to what opponents have claimed, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act will not swing open the prison doors and release thousands of hardcore violent criminals onto the streets. Every single prisoner eligible for early release will be carefully scrutinized by judges. And only if the judges feel it's appropriate will they release them. This judicial check ensures the worst criminals will remain where they belong — in prison — while those who pose little threat can get off the taxpayers' tab and begin productively contributing to society.
The bill would also expand the use of mandatory minimums for offenders with previous convictions for violent crimes, and it creates new mandatory minimums for terrorism-related crimes, giving federal law enforcement additional mechanisms to keep those most dangerous behind bars.
Now is the time for Congress to act. Reducing the population of our overcrowded prisons is one of the few goals on which those on the left and right agree. We want to make it clear where law enforcement stands: Not only is passing federal legislation to reform mandatory minimum sentences necessary to reduce incarceration, it will also help us keep crime at its historic low.
Some recent prior related posts on SRCA:
- Basic elements of Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015
- Leading distinct GOP Senators make the case for federal sentencing reform via SRCA 2015
- Senate Judiciary Committee moving forward next week on Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015
- Submitted testimony from witnesses at SRCA 2015 hearing (and member statements) now available
- SRCA 2015 passes through Senate Judiciary Committee by vote of 15-5
- US Sentencing Commission provides estimates on likely impact of sentencing reforms in SRCA 2015
- Former AG Michael Mukasey and other former DOJ leaders urge Senate to move forward with vote on sentencing and corrections reform
March 1, 2016 in Aspects and impact of Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, Mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (3)
Monday, February 29, 2016
Highlighting the enduring lack of transparency about pleas and the work of prosecutors ... and the problems this may create
The folks at The Crime Report continue to do a lot of notable reporting about a lot of the notable issues discussed at the recent Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This recent piece, headlined "A 'Draconian' System Where the Innocent Plead Guilty," reports on a keynote speech by Judge Jed Rakoff and discussion of the need to bring more light to the dark spaces of plea bargaining and prosecutorial practices. I recommend the piece in full, and here are some excerpts:
The U.S. criminal justice system is broken and needs to be fixed is a message you rarely hear from a well-respected senior federal judge. But that's exactly what Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York detailed during a keynote address at the 11th Annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Friday
"We created this monster and it's taken on a life of its own," said Rakoff, speaking critically of judges who everyday impose "terrible sentences" and send people to prison for extremely long periods of time without questioning the system....
Rakoff detailed how he's seen the system change in the past few decades, from a time where a much higher percentage of court cases went to trial (15 percent of court cases at the federal level 20 percent at the state level) to now where, after tough-on-crime laws swept the nation, only 3 percent of federal cases, and 5 to 6 percent of state cases, go to trial. The rest are settled with plea bargains. He called the plea bargaining process a "system of totally secret justice" where prosecutors, hold all the cards and are able to get a vast majority of defendants to plead guilty to charges when faced with extremely long sentences — imposed through sentencing guidelines or mandatory minimums.
Julie Seaman, a professor at the Emory University School of Law and Board President of the Georgia Innocence Project, said it's now a system where "it's completely rational for an innocent person to plead guilty," because there is so much risk involved in going to trial.
The panel — also featuring Keir Bradford-Gray of the Philadelphia Defender Association, Matthew Johnson of John Jay College, exoneree Rodney Roberts and moderated by John Hollway, executive director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School — detailed problems of this "assembly-line" style form of justice where police are under pressure to solve cases quickly, prosecutors are under pressure to clear cases and public defenders are overworked and under resourced.
And it's all done behind closed doors, they say, away from public scrutiny. "This is a system, because it's so totally un-transparent, is it inevitably going to lead to some serious mistakes," Rakoff said.
There has arguably never been more data and more transparency in the U.S. criminal justice system than there is now. Researchers, journalists, politicians and the public have more access to data on prison and jail populations, as well as crime statistics including the number of reported crimes and arrests. That data has played a large part in changing peoples' minds about mass incarceration — and arguably without that data, you wouldn't see elected officials of both parties rolling back sentencing laws. But data doesn't exist for plea deals, which is where the decisions that dramatically impact millions of lives are made. There is a plethora of information available to the public on how offenders enter the system and where they end up, but missing is information on what happens in the middle.
Rakoff says this is a problem that has fueled mass incarceration – and also because when innocent people decide to plead guilty in order to avoid long sentences, we never know the truth. He said there is too much disparity in pleas that are offered and we don't know enough about what goes on behind closed doors. "No one ever knows what the truth is, no one ever knows what the facts are," Rakoff said.
February 29, 2016 in Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (3)
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Profiling a federal district judge eager to make the case for federal sentencing discretion
The Atlantic has this lengthy new article profiling a notable federal district judge and his notable disaffinity for rigid sentencing rules. The piece's full title highlights is themes: "One Judge Makes the Case for Judgment: John Coughenour says federal sentencing guidelines are overly punitive, coldly algorithmic measures that strip the courtroom of nuance. Without discretion, what's the judiciary for?". Here is part of the start and middle of a piece that merits a full Sunday read:
Judge John Coughenour is a rebel. It's not because — or not only because — he rides a Harley or spends his free time in prisons. It's that the Reagan-appointed U.S. District Court judge has rebelled against federal sentencing guidelines ever since they were established in the mid-1980s.
But Coughenour had never earned national attention for his nonconformist ideas about sentencing and punishment — until, that is, al-Qaeda trainee Ahmed Ressam appeared in his courtroom in the spring of 2001. Over the course of the next 11 years, Coughenour would sit down to sentence Ressam to prison on three separate occasions, all for the same crime — two times to huge uproar and one time to clarify the sentence once and for all....
Coughenour was appointed during President Ronald Reagan's first year in office, a few years before the federal sentencing guidelines were created. The new system was meant to counteract the wild inconsistencies in the sentences handed down in different courts. Instead of going simply by intuition, federal judges would now refer to a handbook that established a sentencing range. And any discretion on the part of judges was intended to be restricted to the limits of that range. But what some saw as a reasonable step toward greater justice, Coughenour saw as inhumane and robotic. What's the point of a judge if he is discouraged from offering his judgment?
Once on the fringe, Coughenour's argument against sentencing guidelines is now gaining traction. At the heart of the debate is an undecided question: Which is scarier — a world where a person's actions are treated as part of a mathematical equation blind to context, or a world where political appointees decide people's fates based on gut feelings?
Coughenour's position is clear. He believes that the standardization of sentences has resulted in less justice, not more, and that the way the nation sentences criminals today has created greater inequality, not less....
[T]wice a year for almost 20 years, Coughenour rode his Harley from Seattle to Sheridan to meet one on one with each of the men he had sentenced. And then, he started visiting prisons all over the country with the same purpose. To ensure candor, he insisted that the prisoners be unshackled and that the meetings be private. A corrections officer stood outside just in case, but in two decades, Coughenour only had to call the officer in once.
During these meetings, the judge always asked the same questions: "How much time do you have left? What are you doing to prepare yourself for getting out? Are you dealing with anything you can't handle? Do you feel safe?" Sometimes, he'd compare notes about motorcycles — word traveled fast that the judge rode a Harley — and sometimes he'd just commiserate about prison food. The next prisoner would be escorted in 15 minutes later, and the judge would start over again. Coughenour resists the implication that his visits — and the hundreds of hours he has spent asking hundreds of prisoners about their lives — have influenced his judicial philosophy. But at the same time, Coughenour insists that the prisoners' stories all carry a clear moral lesson: Too many people are in prison for too long.
February 28, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (4)
Friday, February 26, 2016
"Internalizing Private Prison Externalities: Let's Start with the GED"
The title of this post is the title of this interesting and timely new piece by David Siegel recently posted on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Prison education is a remarkably good investment for society, yet an increasing proportion of inmates have no access to it because the operators of the prisons in which they are held have a powerful incentive not to provide it: they make more money that way. Critics and analysts of private prison operators have suggested various incentive structures to improve their performance, but most jurisdictions focus on the operator's cost to the contracting entity. The social costs imposed by foregoing prison education are not part of the arrangement between a private prison operator and a jurisdiction with which it contracts. Although these costs are real and substantial to the inmates who bear them, because the inmates are not parties to the contract, these costs are externalities.
Imposing these social costs on prison operators could improve the conditions for inmates in their custody and is very likely to improve these inmates' success after release. Unlike more complex strategies for imposing incentives on correctional programs to reduce recidivism, prison education is a known, straightforward rehabilitative strategy whose provision can be measured quite easily at the point of release. There is even a well-accepted metric for prison education administered by an independent third party: the General Educational Development Test (GED). This article proposes using the GED to internalize the cost of reduced or poor inmate education by imposing financial penalties on private prison operators whose inmates do not obtain, or make progress toward, a GED during their incarceration. This would provide the social benefits of inmate education, alter private prison operators' behavior at minimal administrative cost, and most importantly, benefit inmates being released.
February 26, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Thursday, February 25, 2016
"Does Smarter Sentencing Equal Lower Prison Numbers?"
The title of this post is the headline of this lengthy new piece by Adam Wisnieski at The Crime Report, which is largely a report on what various experts are saying about the impact of modern sentencing reforms on prison populations. I recommend the piece in full, and here are some excerpts (with a few of the original's links preserved):
Most analysts agree that states have been much further ahead than the feds on these issues. For the past year, members of Congress have been debating a variety of bills that would make changes to federal sentencing guidelines similar to some of the revisions already underway at the state level. The proposed Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act has received widespread bipartisan support — but is now stalled by the resurgence of concerns that relaxing punishment standards would lead to an increase in crime.
There's no shortage of voices about what type of impact that bill would have. But few seem to look to states for lessons, regardless of the well-worn phrase about them being "laboratories of democracy." Have states been successful? Experts contacted by The Crime Report had different views.
Adam Gelb, director of The Pew Charitable Trusts' Public Safety Performance Project said that the national conversation on criminal justice is undergoing a transformation. "We are really starting to see a culture shift in which policymakers are becoming eager to base decisions on data and evidence rather than emotion or ideology," Gelb said in an interview. "There's been a tremendous amount of progress but there's still a long way to go."
Other researchers disagree, saying there is more smoke than fire in state efforts. Minor tweaks to sentencing policies, which they say is largely what states have done, have not worked to significantly impact the nation's mass incarceration problem. "Most states have not made any progress," says James Austin, who runs the Washington, D.C.- and California-based JFA Institute, a criminal-justice consulting firm. "Those that are making some progress, it's been pretty miniscule."
Michael Tonry, director of the Institute on Crime and Public Policy of the University of Minnesota argues the same thing. In his new book, Sentencing Fragments: Penal Reform in America, 1975-2025, Tonry describes states' approach to reducing prison population through minor changes to sentencing and release policies as "nibbling" around the edges of the problem. "What's being done is these little tiny tweaking around the edges, and then making big projections," he said in an interview with The Crime Report. "That's not how the world is going to change."...
About 13 percent of our country's prisoners are serving time in federal prisons. The other 87 percent, more than 1.3 million people according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, are in state prisons.
That number of state prisoners hasn't changed dramatically in the last decade; it's leveled off. The number of people in state prisons is about the same as it was ten years ago. From 2004 to 2014, the state prison population went up from roughly 1.32 million to 1.35 million, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
That most recent number (1.35 million state prisoners in 2014) is down from its high water mark, 1.41 million in 2008. Critics suspect the leveling off could be attributed to harsh sentences imposed in the 1980s and 1990s finally coming to an end. But defenders point to the nation's decreased incarceration rate as real progress. The nation's adult incarceration rate, which includes offenders in not only state prisons, but federal prisons and local jails, dropped 10 percent from 2007 to 2014, from 1 in 100 to 1 in 111. "The incarceration rate has declined steadily each year since 2008," notes the most recent report on the correctional populations in the U.S. by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Last week, The Sentencing Project released an analysis on how well states have handled the problem of growing prison populations. "Relatively modest," the report concluded. "While 39 states have experienced a decline since reaching their peak prison populations within the past 15 years, in most states this reduction has been relatively modest," reads the report. "The overall pace of change, though, is quite modest given the scale of incarceration."
Tonry says one reason why reforms in certain states haven't achieved projected gains is that stakeholders like prosecutors, judges and parole boards are not invested in changing the system. "The problem with tweaking things is they have to be implemented by somebody," he said....
One state that has gotten a lot of press recently for figuring out how to successfully reform harsh sentencing laws is Georgia. In 2011, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed a bill that modified mandatory minimum sentences on drug charges, gave judges more discretion in drug sentencing, raised the felony threshold for certain theft crimes. Since the bill was signed, Georgia's prison population has gone down every year, from 55,944 in 2011 to 52,949 in 2014, a slight decrease but a decrease nonetheless.
If that bill, along with another bill on juvenile justice in 2012, had not been passed, the state says its prison population would have gone up by 8 percent and cost $264 million more to expand capacity. The policy change has saved the state millions, but according to a report last year by the state's Council on Criminal Justice Reform, Georgia's prison population is projected to go up every year over the next five years.
So at least for Georgia, success seems to be measured on figuring out how to slow the increase, but not to reverse the trend. There is reason for optimism, though. Despite those projections, the prion population has actually continued its downward trend — and policymakers haven't given up. After initial reforms were passed in 2011, Georgia has passed reforms every year since 2011, something states like Kentucky haven't done. "Georgia is back year after year," said Gelb. "That kind of reform-minded environment can have an impact well beyond specific changes to law and policy."
February 25, 2016 in Data on sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, State Sentencing Guidelines | Permalink | Comments (2)
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Vera Institute of Justice launches "The Human Toll of Jail"
I received an email this morning announcing the launch of a notable new project by The Vera Institute of Justice. Here is the heart of the email (with a few links) detailing what the project is all about:
The Human Toll of Jail [is] a national storytelling project about the uses and abuses of jails in the United States, supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge.
The Human Toll of Jail uses poignant essays, videos, comics, and photojournalism to tell the stories of Americans who have been caught up in local justice systems as well as highlight unexpected voices for reform from the frontlines — including judges, prosecutors, healthcare providers, and others. Along with every story featured here, the project offers additional resources with research, policy analyses, and best practices that address the larger questions and issues around local jails. Stories in the project include:
INSIDE THE MASSIVE JAIL THAT DOUBLES AS CHICAGO'S LARGEST MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY — Since drastic budget cuts left thousands of Chicagoans without access to reliable mental health care, all too many are getting their only real treatment when they land behind bars.
RETURN TO RIKERS — After two decades of incarceration, Patrick went back to Rikers Island for the first time in 20 years — to visit his son. His story is told here as comics journalism.
THE JAIL WITHOUT BARS — At one Idaho correctional facility, an innovative approach is built on a commitment to the site's workers and an investment in the inmates' success. The result is a jail that looks nothing like the ones you've seen on TV.
A NEW APPROACH TO PROSECUTION — Local prosecutors across the country wield enormous power to make decisions that affect the flow of people in and out of often-overcrowded jails. With that power in mind, the district attorney in one California county wants to upend the way we think about his job responsibilities.
JUDGING WITHOUT JAIL — Many states have made moves to end the fruitless cycle of arrest and incarceration by moving nonviolent defendants out of prosecution and into more productive intervention programs. One New Orleans judge has seen just how effective this approach can be.
February 24, 2016 in Offender Characteristics, Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (1)
Friday, February 19, 2016
Making the case for criminal justice "frugality"
The quoted portion of the title of this post is from the last line of this new USA Today commentary authored by criminologist James Alan Fox and sociologist Richard Moran. The commentary is given the headline "that "Soft on crime turns out to be smart on crime," but I am not sure that really captures what the commentary is trying to say. Here are excerpts so readers can judge for themself:
The shame of wrongful conviction has captured the public's imagination.... Many of the hundreds who have been exonerated and released from prison in the past several decades were prosecuted during a period of high crime rates and unprecedented fear. At a time when a no-nonsense, "lock 'em up" criminal justice policy carried the day, the nation largely turned a blind eye to injustices. We were far more intent on ensuring public safety than protecting the rights of the accused. Meanwhile, a booming economy afforded close to a ten-fold expansion in state and federal prison populations.
Times have changed. Crime rates are at a 50-year low, and, in part due to runaway correctional expenditures, a majority of states are struggling to balance their budgets. This dire financial situation has forced politicians to seek out cost-saving measures, and the low crime rate has allowed them to do so without much public opposition.
The focus on innocence and exoneration actually reflects a much broader rethinking of our criminal justice policies in the context of low crime and limited resources. When crime rates were rising, the cops were handed a mandate to do whatever it took to arrest criminals. Now the police are being held accountable like never before. We are questioning their use of deadly force, and equipping them with body cameras to monitor their every move.
Similarly, the 1990s panic over youth and gang violence had us characterizing juvenile offenders as "superpredators" who were beyond redemption. The popular slogan "adult time for adult crime" echoed a "get-tough" approach for punishing kids. Recently, however, the U.S. Supreme Court abolished mandatory life sentences for minors. And policy makers have recommitted to the original philosophy of juvenile justice, prioritizing the needs of young offenders rather than what punishment is deserved.
The 1990s also saw the rapid spread of a penal policy patterned after a well-known baseball refrain — "three strikes and you're out." This metaphorical approach to sentencing felons helped nearly bankrupt many states, especially California where "three strikes" was most enthusiastically adopted.
Thousands upon thousands of Americans were taken prisoner in the "War on Drugs" declared in the early 1970s when crime rates soared. Having surrendered this misguided campaign, the nation is now looking more toward treatment for addicts than punishment, and releasing nonviolent drug offenders from prison.
Many, if not all, of the recent shifts in philosophy reflect the fact that we simply can't afford to keep millions of Americans locked behind bars. Mass incarceration may have contributed marginally to bringing down the crime rate, but it was hardly a cost-effective strategy. Rehabilitation, despite its limitations, is significantly cheaper and far more attractive to cost-conscious lawmakers and their constituents.
For several decades, ever since Richard Nixon won the White House on a "law and order" platform, the predominant response to crime was decidedly punitive. Today's proposed criminal justice reforms — from deincarceration to exoneration — would have been condemned as soft on crime. Whether they will prove to be smart on crime, as reformers have promised, one thing is for sure: They are frugal, and frugality is definitely in fashion these days.
February 19, 2016 in Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Thursday, February 18, 2016
"U.S. Prison Population Trends 1999-2014: Broad Variation Among States in Recent Years"
The title of this post is the title of this notable short "fact sheet" from The Sentencing Project. Here is the text that goes with the graphical state-by-state data in the document
The number of people in prison in the United States has stabilized in recent years, but incarceration trends among the states have varied significantly. While 39 states have experienced a decline since reaching their peak prison populations within the past 15 years, in most states this reduction has been relatively modest. In addition, 11 states have had continuing rises in imprisonment.
Twelve states have produced double-digit declines within this period. Four states have reduced their prison populations by over 20%: New Jersey (31% since 1999), New York (28% since 1999), Rhode Island (25% since 2008), and California (22% since 2006, though partly offset by increasing jail use). Southern states including Mississippi and South Carolina, which have historically had high rates of incarceration, have also significantly downsized their prison populations. These reductions have come about through a mix of changes in policy and practice designed to reduce admissions to prison and lengths of stay. Moreover, the states with the most substantial reductions have had no adverse effect on public safety.
The overall pace of change, though, is quite modest given the scale of incarceration. The total U.S. prison population declined by 2.9% since its peak in 2009. Of those states with declining prison populations, 20 have had less than a 5% decline since their peak years. The reduction in the federal prison population has been of this magnitude as well, 2.9% since 2011. And of the states with rising prison populations, four have experienced double-digit increases in the last five years, led by Nebraska (22%) and Arkansas (18%). While sharing in the national crime drop, these states have resisted the trend toward decarceration.
Just as mass incarceration has developed primarily as a result of changes in policy, not crime rates, so too have declines reflected changes in both policy and practice. These have included such measures as drug policy sentencing reforms, reduced admissions of technical parole violators to prison, and diversion options for persons convicted of lower-level property and drug crimes.
February 18, 2016 in Data on sentencing, Detailed sentencing data, Prisons and prisoners, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (2)
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Is federal bail reform key to making a serious dent in mass incarceration?
The question in the title of this post is prompted by this notable This Week commentary by Ryan Cooper, headlined "President Bernie Sanders couldn't stop mass incarceration by himself. But this one reform would be a very good start." Here are excerpts (with a few links from the original):
[Many have] badly understated the extent to which federal policy affects incarceration outside of federal prisons — particularly jails. It's a great opportunity for Sanders to clarify his message [about reducing incarceration] and seize on bail reform — a vastly overlooked part of the mass incarceration problem. While it probably wouldn't move the U.S. from the top spot by itself, bail reform could make an enormous difference....
First, federal crime policy exerts a strong gravitational pull on state behavior. Federal sentencing guidelines heavily influenced the state versions; state-level lawyers, judges, and policymakers tend to look to the higher-status federal system for cues and ideas, and there is much back-and-forth staff movement. Hence, if the federal criminal justice system were to make a sharp turn against harsh punishments, it's virtually certain that would percolate through some if not most of the state systems and thus reduce the prison population over time. Federal leadership matters here.
This effect also holds for bail policy, which is the primary determinant of the size of the jail population. As I covered extensively last year, about 62 percent of the people in jail are legally innocent. A major reason why is the Bail Reform Act of 1984, which made it dramatically easier to keep people locked up before federal trials; most of the states followed suit. Today, roughly two-thirds of the people in jail are there either because they are too poor to make bail, or because they've just been arrested and will make bail in the next few days. Over the last 15 years, fully 99 percent of the growth in the jail population is due to increased incarceration of the legally innocent.
This is a human rights atrocity for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest one is that the first 48 hours or so in jail is extremely traumatic for people with no experience in the prison system. It's why the suicide rate in jails is 2.5 times greater than in actual prisons — witness Sandra Bland, an ordinary middle-class person who apparently committed suicide very soon after being thrown in jail.
Now, it would be unconstitutional for Congress to simply force states to change the way they do bail. But there are four less direct avenues to pursue: First, pursue reform for federal prisoners, to take advantage of the percolation effect mentioned above. Second, put conditions on the many grants the feds dole out for the states' criminal justice systems, requiring bail reform as a condition of getting the money. Third, pass a law declaring current use of money bail a violation of the 14th Amendment's due process protection, which Congress has power to protect. Fourth, there is a very strong case that current bail policy is a violation of the 8th Amendment, so the Department of Justice could pursue a lawsuit and attempt to get a Supreme Court ruling allowing the feds to step in. The last two of these are a bit of a long shot, but taken together this would be a powerful package.
But what would bail reform look like? There are two basic principles: First, work to make sure arrestees are processed as fast as possible — ideally within 24 hours, as many jurisdictions are moving towards. Second, very sharply reduce the use of money bail. If used, it should never be beyond a person's ability to pay. No person should ever rot in jail waiting for a trial because he can't scrounge up the cash to make bail — poverty should not be a crime. Besides, research from the Vera Institute of Justice shows that bail is largely worthless for making sure that accused criminals show up to trial. In most cases, it simply isn't needed — basic pretrial supervision works much better.
There is tremendous churn in and out of the jail system — 11.4 million people were admitted in 2014. Bail reform would thus be more about diverting the flow of prisoners rather than releasing lots of long-term ones. A new federal law mandating speedy processing of arrestees, and sharply restricting the use of money-bail, would erode the jail population from two directions at once. It could be combined with incentives to use alternatives to arrest, like citation-and-release or pre-booking diversion, to further slow the rate of jail entry. At a very rough guess, such a reform done well could knock about a third — perhaps 200,000 people — off the jail population.
At any rate, even very aggressive bail reform wouldn't get us to the Chinese figure of 1.66 million prisoners quoted above, and it would require congressional action. But bail reform would be a gigantic step in the right direction. When it comes to fighting mass incarceration, it's the easiest and most obvious first step.
February 17, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
"Texas prisons are filling up with the old and the ill — at enormous expense"
The title of this post is the sub-headline of this lengthy new Texas Observer article. Here are excerpts:
Benito Alonzo is a short, 140-pound 80-year-old. His quiet-spoken manner, drooping jowls and gray hair, trimmed in a buzz, give him the appearance of a benevolent grandfather, and indeed, he is a grandfather. In thick-framed black eyeglasses, he bears a resemblance to the defanged and aging Henry Kissinger. But Alonzo is neither a celebrity nor a statesman. He's a convict who has lately grown infirm. He says he's been diagnosed with prostate cancer and he's afflicted with Hepatitis C. For several years he's been prescribed a drug called Lactulose, which Dr. Owen Murray, chief of medical affairs for the Texas penal system, says "we use for people whose livers are at the end of their lives."...
Alonzo has been waiting since at least March for the start of a 12-week course of a new liver drug that might keep him alive for years to come. He's been told that the treatment will cost $94,500. Were he back on the streets, Medicare would pick up the tab. But because federal courts have ruled that states must guarantee the safety and health of their inmates, Texas will have to pay. Alonzo frets that because of the expense, prison bureaucrats will stall the treatment until it's too late.
The state of Texas operates 109 prisons holding about 148,000 inmates. Some 27,000 of them are, like Alonzo, over the age of 50. They account for about 18 percent of the prison population, and are the fastest-growing demographic group among prisoners. By most estimates, they are also the most expensive to keep under lock and key. According to TDCJ spokesman Robert Hurst, the average cost of housing Texas inmates is about $20,000 a year, but medical and end-of-life expenses hike that figure to some $30,000 for elderly inmates. In other jurisdictions, the cost is even higher. A 2012 report from the ACLU calculates the average national expense for keeping a prisoner at $34,000 per year — and twice that much, $68,000, for inmates older than 50.
Both demographic factors and get-tough sentencing have transformed what were once mere penal institutions into hospitals, assisted living centers and nursing homes, too. The University of Texas Medical Branch operates a freestanding hospital in Galveston for TDCJ, which also contracts with UTMB and the Texas Tech medical school to send prisoners to 146 community hospitals. Texas prisons now boast of "respiratory isolation rooms," "brace and limb services" and hospice facilities in which 90 Texas inmates were eased into eternity last year. More than 300 inmates in Texas prisons use wheelchairs, Dr. Murray says....
Alonzo's life has been one of alternating spans of heroin addiction and confinement. He served three separate stints in prison — for theft, burglary and heroin possession — from 1958 to 1974. After his parole in 1974, allegedly under the influence of two of his brothers, Pedro and Adolfo, he delivered a pair of pistols to a warden's trustee who then smuggled them into Huntsville's Walls Unit. San Antonio gangster Fred Carrasco used those guns in an 11-day hostage-taking and stand-off that culminated in a shootout. Alonzo is serving a life sentence for his connection to the incident....
The state of Texas does have a process for releasing old and infirm prisoners on humanitarian parole, but the record is underwhelming. A bureaucracy dating to 1987, the Texas Correctional office on offenders with Medical or Mental Impairments, usually named by the clunky acronym TCOOMMI, was assigned to process medically recommended intensive supervision, or MRIS, paroles. MRIS is a way to move inmates rendered harmless by their frailty or age back into the civilian world.
TCOOMMI reports to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on an inmate's health status, leaving the final parole decision to the board. In a February 2015 biennial report, TCOOMMI reported that of the 1,133 MRIS applications that had been submitted in fiscal year 2014, 318 had been found sufficiently meritorious for presentation to the parole board. Of those, the board had granted 67 releases — a mere 6 percent approval rate.
In a 2012 statement, TDCJ admitted that "the Parole Board's approval rates of MRIS cases remain low." But the board's performance hasn't shown signs of improvement. In the 2015 fiscal year, 445 prisoners older than 60 filed for medical paroles — but only 24 paroles were granted, all of them on the basis of infirmity, none on the basis of age. The roadblock is a provision of the law allowing the parole board to conclude that a prisoner constitutes a threat despite what doctors say....
Benito Alonzo would today have a hard time exacting any revenge or harming anybody, and whether he lives or dies is of little concern except to a coterie of kin and perhaps in the circles of the Mexican Mafia. If he dies in prison, as we must currently expect, though he'd prefer to be interred in San Antonio, his corpse will be eligible for a casket and a grave at public expense, in the prison cemetery, of course.
February 16, 2016 in Offender Characteristics, Prisons and prisoners, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered | Permalink | Comments (1)
Monday, February 15, 2016
US Sentencing Commission to conduct hearing on compassionate release and conditions of supervision
As reported in this official notice, the US Sentencing Commission is scheduled to conduct a public hearing the morning of Wednesday, February 17, 2016. This hearing agenda suggests that the main focus of the hearing is so-called "Compassionate Release" and that all of the leading and most important voices in this space will be speaking to the USSC.
Some prior related posts:
- Effective commentary urges greater us of "compassionate release"
- New report assails (lack of) compassionate release in federal system
- NY Times editorial laments lack of compassionate release
February 15, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Friday, February 12, 2016
At debate, Bernie Sanders promises that "at the end of my first term as president we will not have more people in jail than any other country"
I have lost interest not only in blogging before for every Presidential debate, but also in watching most of them. But, perhaps not surprisingingly as the Prez campaign marches forward to more diverse states than Iowa and New Hampshire, last night's Democratic debate saw Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders talking about modern policing, racial disparities in our criminal justice system and mass incarceration. Of particular note was Sanders making the promise highlighted in the title of this post. Here is a little bit more of what Senator Sanders had to say on these fronts:
This mandatory sentencing, a very bad idea. It takes away discretion from judges. We have got to demilitarize local police departments so they do not look like occupying armies. We have got to make sure that local police departments look like the communities they serve in their diversity.
And, where we are failing abysmally is in the very high rate of recidivism we see. People are being released from jail without the education, without the job training, without the resources that they need to get their lives together, then they end up -- we're shocked that they end up back in jail again. So, we have a lot of work to do.
But, here is a pledge I've made throughout this campaign, and it's really not a very radical pledge. When we have more people in jail, disproportionately African American and Latino, than China does, a communist authoritarian society four times our size. Here's my promise, at the end of my first term as president we will not have more people in jail than any other country. We will invest in education, and jobs for our kids, not incarceration and more jails.
Helpfully, Leon Neyfakh not only noticed this significant promise, but also quickly authored this Slate commentary about it. The headline of the post provides a flavor of its themes: "Sanders Is Delusional if He Thinks He Can Keep His Promise on Mass Incarceration." Here is the heart of is effective commentary:
What Sanders means by this is that under just four years of his magical leadership, the U.S. will bring down its jail and prison population by about 600,000 people. Where does that figure come from? Consider that the No. 2 spot on the list of countries with the most prisoners in the world right now is China, and it has about 1.66 million people behind bars. The U.S., by comparison, has about 2.3 million.
Sanders did not mention during his remarks how he plans to make the leap from 2.3 million to fewer than 1.66 million. But regardless of what he has in mind, it's pure fantasy for several reasons. Chief among them is that the president of the United States has no direct control over most of the nation's correctional facilities. This is because jails, which currently hold fewer than 745,000 people, are under local control, and state prisons, which hold about 1.35 million, are under state control. That leaves the federal prison system — the only one that the federal government is actually in charge of — with 210,000 people, or about 10 percent of the pie.
It's true that the president has a "bully pulpit" from which he can say inspiring things that set the tone for officials working at all levels of government. It's also true that in theory, the federal government could try to bribe state governments to rely less on incarceration. But the bottom line is that the feds can only set policy for their own prison system and that means there's a very low ceiling on the amount of progress that a president, no matter how ambitious he or she is, can do to reduce the prison population....
This would be a good time to remember, also, that Congress' current efforts to bring down the prison population by enacting very modest sentencing reforms appear to be falling apart in slow motion because there are enough lawmakers in Washington who think it's too dangerous to set anyone free, ever. And this is at a time when there's supposed to be a historic bipartisan consensus over the need for reform.
If Sanders wants to release more than 500,000 people by 2020, he's going to have to break them out personally. If he has a more efficient approach in mind, he needs to share it before he makes this ridiculous promise again.
February 12, 2016 in Campaign 2016 and sentencing issues, Elections and sentencing issues in political debates, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (8)
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Notable data on racial and gender dynamics of recent changes in incarceration rates
This new Wonkblog post via the Washington Post reports on provides an interesting analysis of modern incarceration data under the headline "There's been a big decline in the black incarceration rate, and almost nobody's paying attention." Here are the details:
After decades of growth, the U.S. imprisonment rate has been declining for the past six years. Hidden within this welcome overall trend is a sizable and surprising racial disparity: African-Americans are benefitting from the national de-incarceration trend but whites are serving time at increasingly higher rates.
The pattern of results, evident in a series of reports from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is most stark among women. Since 2000, the imprisonment rate among African-American women has dropped 47 percent, while the rate among white women has risen by 56 percent. These trends have combined to shrink the racial disparity in women's imprisonment by two-thirds.
A similar pattern emerges for men, who compose a much larger share of the prison population. The rate of imprisonment among African-American men remains very high, but nonetheless it has tumbled 22 percent since 2000. The rate for white men in contrast is 4 percent higher than it was in 2000. As a result, the racial disparity has shrunk by nearly one quarter.
In responding to the data, Fordham University Professor John Pfaff echoed several criminologists when he said that"This is one of the most surprising pattern of results I have seen in corrections in a long time." Pfaff said that "law enforcement attitudes getting tougher in rural areas and softer in urban areas may be contributing to this change."
Adam Gelb, who directs the public safety performance project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, suggested that "changes in drug use and enforcement over the past 15 years could be at play." Gelb said the methamphetamine, prescription opioid and heroin epidemics have affected whites more than did the crack cocaine epidemic, which increased incarceration among blacks in the 1980s and 1990s but has since waned.
Stanford Law School Professor Joan Petersilia noted another possible cause: "sex offenders, who are disproportionately white and tend to receive long sentences, are a new target for the war on crime." Consistent with this explanation, a larger proportion of white inmates have been convicted of sex crimes (16.4 percent) than have black inmates (8 percent)....
Whatever cultural and macroeconomic forces are producing these changes could conceivably also be driving increased involvement in the criminal justice system by whites, including rising imprisonment in an era of de-incarceration.
February 11, 2016 in Data on sentencing, Detailed sentencing data, Prisons and prisoners, Race, Class, and Gender, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (2)
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
"The State of Sentencing 2015: Developments in Policy and Practice"
The title of this post is the title of this great new publication from The Sentencing Project. Here is a summary of its contents drawn from an email I received earlier today:
[This] new report from The Sentencing Project, The State of Sentencing 2015: Developments in Policy and Practice, [was] authored by Nicole D. Porter, Director of Advocacy. The report highlights reforms in 30 states that demonstrate a continued trend to reform sentencing policies and scale back the use of imprisonment without compromising public safety. It provides an overview of recent policy reforms in the areas of sentencing, probation and parole, collateral consequences, and juvenile justice. Highlights include:
Sentencing: At least 12 states authorized new sentencing laws or modified policy practices including: abolishing the death penalty; reducing criminal penalties; and sentence reduction policies for mandatory sentences.
Probation/Parole: Lawmakers in at least six states modified policies relating to community supervision including statutory guidance designed to reduce returns to prison for technical probation and parole violators.
Collateral Consequences: Officials in at least 14 states authorized changes in policy and practice to the collateral impacts of a conviction including: expanding voting rights; eliminating public benefits bans for felony drug convictions; and addressing employment barriers.
Juvenile Justice: Lawmakers in ten states adopted juvenile justice reforms including: banning mandatory life-without-parole sentences for justice involved youth and limiting prosecutorial discretion in automatic transfer policies for juvenile defendants.
February 10, 2016 in Mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, Offender Characteristics, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment, State Sentencing Guidelines, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, February 09, 2016
Is California conducting an "unprecedented experiment in mass forgiveness"?
The question in the title of this post is prompted by the headline of this lengthy new Washington Post article, which suggests the Golden State has become a unique criminal justice laboratory. Here are excerpts:
[Jose] Gonzalez is among thousands of felons benefiting from a grand experiment, an act of mass forgiveness unprecedented in U.S. history. In California, once a national innovator in draconian policies to get tough on crime, voters and lawmakers are now innovating in the opposite direction, adopting laws that have released tens of thousands of inmates and are preventing even more from going to prison in the first place.
The most famous is a landmark ballot measure called Proposition 47, which in 2014 made California the first state in the nation to make possession of any drug — including cocaine and heroin — a misdemeanor. More astonishing is the state's decision to show leniency toward violent offenders, including murderers like Gonzalez.
For example, the state has ordered parole hearings for longtime inmates convicted of committing violent crimes before they turned 23, requiring authorities to consider anew whether immaturity at the time of the inmates' offense argues for their release.
Meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has approved parole for roughly 2,300 lifers convicted of murder and about 450 lifers sentenced for lesser offenses — a revolution in a state that released only two lifers during former governor Gray Davis's entire four-year term. And more reforms could be in store. Last month, Brown unveiled a ballot measure that, if approved by voters in November, would grant early release to nonviolent felons who complete rehab programs and demonstrate good behavior.
Progressives across the nation have applauded California's U-turn. "There is a gathering sense that the public is considerably less punitive than people had thought," said Joe Margulies, a professor of law and government at Cornell University.
But with crime in some of California's largest cities ticking up after years of sustained decline, many law enforcement leaders and victims' advocates say the state has gone too far. "Our hope was folks getting out of prisons are going to come out and be model citizens," said Christine Ward, executive director of the Crime Victims Action Alliance. "Unfortunately, we're not seeing that."...
So far, 250 inmates have been released under the Youth Offender Parole law, most of them violent offenders. As many as 16,000 more remain eligible. Meanwhile, a study by Stanford Law School found that Proposition 47 had unlocked the cell doors of nearly 4,500 prisoners since taking effect in late 2014.
Sheriffs, police chiefs and prosecutors speculate that Prop 47 has contributed to a recent rise in crime and homelessness in major California cities, arguing that the law eliminated a useful billy club: the threat of a felony conviction to steer addicts into treatment. "It's a vicious cycle," said Kirk Albanese, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. "You've got an addiction, we are not holding you accountable, and you're back into the cycle of using. How do you support that habit? Stealing. Our burglaries are up, car theft is up, break-ins are up — they are all up."
Hilary Chittick, a veteran judge for the Superior Court of Fresno County, said Prop 47 has "decimated" her ability to force addicts into treatment. "The public had a house with a leaky roof and bad pipes," she said. "So they blew up the house."
Prop 47 supporters acknowledge the problem and say efforts are underway to address it. More drug courts, for instance, are opening their doors to misdemeanants as well as felons, said Prop 47 co-author Lenore Anderson, executive director of the advocacy group Californians for Safety and Justice. "If you think that you need a stick in order to mandate treatment, that option is available with a misdemeanor," Anderson said. But Prop 47 supporters reject the notion that the ballot measure contributed to localized spikes in crime. Early reports indicate that recidivism among inmates released under the full range of reforms has been low....
In general, more than half of inmates released from California prisons — 54 percent — return to prison within three years. Among lifers paroled under Brown, the Los Angeles Times found, fewer than 2 percent have committed new crimes. Among the 2,100 inmates released after the softening of the state's three-strikes law, only about 6 percent have returned to prison. Michael Romano, director and co-founder of the Stanford Law School Three Strikes Project, attributes the success of this cohort in part to extensive rehab, but also to a kind of forgiveness psychology.
Because I do not live in California, it is hard for me to judge whether the state is genuinely engaged in "mass forgiveness" when passing laws designed to reduce its prison population and the severity of its sentncing laws. But there is little doubt that all sorts of significant criminal justice reforms are now playing out in California, and it will be quite valuable and important for criminal justice advoates and researchers to watch and study crime and punishment developments in the state in the months and years to come.
February 9, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Sentences Reconsidered | Permalink | Comments (3)
Mark you calendar for ASKS, a big alternative sentencing summit next month in DC
I am pleased to be able to promote an exciting event taking place next month: the Alternative Sentencing Key-Stakeholder Summit (ASKS), at Georgetown University Law Center, DC on March 7-8, 2016. Here is a link for registration, and here is the ASKS gameplan and a Q&A via its website:
Summit Overview: Alternative sentencing has been at the heart of improving public safety and includes successful sentencing, reentry and other fiscally responsible criminal justice policies and programs both in the U.S. and around the globe. As the U.S. starts 2016 with commitments from the President and Congress to pass meaningful federal criminal justice reform legislation, the time is right to evaluate the role alternative sentencing can play in furthering the key objectives of public safety and fiscal responsibility.
More Info: Who will participate in the ASKS Summit? The summit will bring together an unprecedented number of current and former leaders and senior government officials who have served on the front lines of day-to-day operations in the criminal justice system, including law enforcement, government, judiciary, defense, forensic social workers and psychologists, and nonprofits, as well as formerly incarcerated people, victims and advocacy groups.
What are the ASKS Summit objectives? Beyond education, ASKS will use plenary, breakout and interactive sessions to generate substantive dialogue between all delegates and identify key priorities for:
- Expanding the use of effective alternative sentencing programs while enhancing public safety, including the mechanisms of discretion (police, prosecutorial and judicial) and legislative reforms;
- Addressing public safety concerns over its broadened use and practical barriers to expansion and launching effective new programs in new jurisdictions, including operational limitations, program evaluation and public education;
- NGOs that can help to support broader application of effective alternative sentencing, eg. ubiquity of access and other measures and peripheral programs to help ensure successful reentry.
February 9, 2016 in Criminal Sentences Alternatives, Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Monday, February 08, 2016
"Their 'compassion' is seriously flawed: Politicians care about white addicts — but still love the racist drug war"
The title of this post is the headline of this notable new Salon article authored by Daniel Denvir. Here are excerpts:
It's a new day for American drug policy, at least as far as drug users are concerned. In New Hampshire, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie are speaking to the wrenching pain of losing loved ones to opioid addiction and death, and making the case that drug abuse should be treated by health professionals and not jails....
Republicans on the campaign trail are opening their hearts to addicts and their families, and policymakers from both major parties are backing harm reduction measures like increasing access to the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. The shift in tone and policy is important, and it has understandably caught reporters' attention. "In speaking about their own experiences, Republican candidates are not only allowing themselves to be vulnerable in front of voters, they're also straying from the just-say-no message of Ronald Reagan, whose legacy includes a tough legislative stance on drugs and drug sentencing," writes the New York Times' Emma Roller.
The seeming about-face, however, also reveals a troubling problem: Heroin user demographics have changed dramatically in recent years, from heavily black to overwhelmingly white; and it seems that for politicians, it is the opioid crisis' newly white face that has lent it a relatable quality as far as drug users are concerned. This has not so much been the case for drug dealers....
And therein lies the rub: While many have noted the racial double standard at work, little attention has been paid to its ongoing and pernicious consequence — policy makers are often still approaching drug dealers with ruthlessly punitive measures, and those drug dealers are likely to be black and Hispanic. At least, that is, those for drug dealers who are serving prison time: studies have found that in reality whites are more likely to sell drugs than blacks.
It turns out that Bush and company are not straying as far from drug war orthodoxy as it might seem at first blush. "For dealers, they ought to be put away forever as far as I'm concerned," said Bush, summarizing the new compassionate consensus's harsh edge. "But users — I think we have to be a second-chance country."
While the face of drug users is becoming white, the image of drug dealers often remains black or Hispanic, as blunt-speaking Maine Gov. Ron LePage recently made clear. "These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty – these types of guys – they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home," said LePage. "Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road."
LePage's comments prompted outrage and ridicule because they were racist. But the policy implications go beyond rhetorical offense, because the growing empathy toward white heroin users could actually reinforce or even increase hostility toward drug dealers, especially if they are perceived as being black and Hispanic. Ted Cruz, for one, blamed drug problems on borders left open for "undocumented Democrats." The upshot is that growing compassion toward drug users won't necessarily lead to a major reduction in the number of drug offenders behind bars. Drug dealers already made up the bulk of people serving time for drug crimes, and so the only way to sharply reduce the number of drug offenders in prison is to stop imprisoning so many drug dealers.
Instead, some officials appear to be heading in the opposite direction. Around the country, federal and local prosecutors are pointing to the opioid epidemic as a pretext to charge drug dealers with murder-type offenses in fatal overdoses. In reality, the sort of dealers who Bush and others want to put away for life include both small-time operators and drug users who appear to have shared a small amount of drugs with a friend. One man was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for selling two-tenths of a gram of heroin, $30 worth, to a man who later overdosed. Many dealers, major and minor, are still subject to sentences harsher that what many countries reserve for murderers....
It's not just a problem for Republicans, either. Democratic candidates for president Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have yet to put forward a plan that would actually end the mass incarceration of drug offenders (let alone mass incarceration more generally, which is driven in significant part by the imprisonment of violent offenders). Both have bigger plans than Republicans, however, and Sanders has outdone Clinton by calling for an end to the federal prohibition of marijuana and supporting the reinstatement of federal parole. Both pledge to do something about harsh mandatory minimum sentences. But neither candidate has argued that most drug dealers should not be imprisoned, or suggested more radical but useful alternatives like broad-based legalization and regulation....
There is some movement to relax harsh punishments for nonviolent drug dealers and create programs to divert low-level dealers from prison. In Congress, bipartisan legislation would modestly reform some of the harshest mandatory minimums for drug dealers, President Obama has commuted the sentences of some drug offenders serving incredibly long federal sentences, and the racist discrepancy between federal crack and powder cocaine sentences have been narrowed (but not at all eliminated). But until politicians' rethinking of the drug war extends to drug dealers, hundreds of thousands of people, disproportionately people of color, will be remain bars in the name of a drug war that by all honest accounts has failed to stop people from using drugs.
February 8, 2016 in Drug Offense Sentencing, Offender Characteristics, Offense Characteristics, Race, Class, and Gender, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (1)
Saturday, February 06, 2016
"Instead of building 'super prisons,' let's build super schools"
The title of this post is the headline of this notable commentary by an Alabama state rep in response to a recent proposal by the state's Governor. Here is how the commentary begins:
During his State of the State Address Tuesday night, Gov. Bentley laid out his four-year plan, which included spending up to $800 million to build four new super prisons. The next day, the governor announced that he wants to transfer $181 million out of the education budget and put it in the general fund budget, which also pays for prisons.
Don't get me wrong. There are some very serious problems with our state prisons. What's happening at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women is unacceptable! Changes need to be made, and more prison reform is absolutely needed.
But how can the governor — or any legislators, for that matter — justify spending almost a billion dollars on new accommodations for prisoners while thousands of our children are going to school in run-down facilities that have broken windows and no air conditioning?
Instead of building "super prisons" like what the governor is talking about, how about we build "super schools" instead? Why is the governor willing to invest hundreds-of-millions of dollars in our prison population's future, but wants to cut hundreds-of-millions from our children's future?
Among other points, this commentary highlights the reality that, for states with fixed and limited budgets, any and all extra taxpayer investments in cells can often require a reduction in taxpayer investment in classrooms.
February 6, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (3)
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
"American Exceptionalism in Probation Supervision"
The title of this post is the title of this notable new data brief published by Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. The core product is this interesting graphic (which is really hard to see here, but is very worth checking out). Here is some of the Robina Institute's text that explains some of the graphic's data details:
It is well known that the U.S. leads the world in incarceration rates. This Data Brief shows that, compared with Europe, America is similarly "exceptional" for its high rates of probation supervision. The average probation supervision rate for all fifty states is more than five times the average rate for all European countries included in the most recent Council of Europe data. Several U.S. States with the highest rates of probation supervision (e.g., Ohio, Rhode Island, Idaho, and Indiana) have rates that are eight-to-nine times the average European rate. Such stark differences exist despite the fact that many countries in Europe have overall crime rates that are quite similar to the U.S.
This Data Brief demonstrates for the first time that America suffers from "mass probation" in addition to "mass incarceration." Although probation has often been thought of as an "alternative" to prison or jail sentences, the U.S. has achieved exceptional levels of punitiveness in both incarceration and community supervision. Over the past several decades, the number of people under probation supervision in the U.S. has increased greatly. Nearly 4 million adults were under probation supervision across America at year-end 2013. In all reporting European countries, with roughly twice the population of the U.S., only 1.5 million adults were under probation supervision.
These findings lead to many important questions of law and policy. Most states should closely reexamine the numbers of people who are placed on probation each year, and the lengths of terms they are required to serve. Options for "early termination" of the lowest-risk and most successful probationers should be explored. Some experts in the field allege that probationary sentences do little to control crime, and frequently do more harm than good. Community supervision can make offenders' "reentry" into the law-abiding community more difficult than it needs to be, such as when meetings with probation officers interfere with work responsibilities, or supervision and program fees block probationers' ability to support themselves and their families.
Concerns of this kind should be carefully evaluated by lawmakers in every state. If some uses of probation are counterproductive to the reentry process, or outright "criminogenic," it should be a high priority everywhere to discontinue them. The financial expense and opportunity costs of "mass probation" should also be assessed nationwide. High probation supervision rates cost American taxpayers a great deal of money, and not just in the funding of probation agencies. National data suggest that a large share of all prison admissions come from probation revocations — a substantial number of which are for "technical" violations of sentence conditions rather than new criminal conduct. Far from being an "alternative" to incarceration, probation has been a "feeder" institution or a "conduit" to our prisons and jails. In this respect, misguided probation policy has almost certainly been a major contributor to America's excesses in prison policy. The problems of mass incarceration and mass probation are intimately linked, and they must be tackled together.
February 3, 2016 in Criminal Sentences Alternatives, Prisons and prisoners, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (3)
Tuesday, February 02, 2016
"The Irrationality of Natural Life Sentences"
The title of this post is the headline of this New York Times Opinionator column authored by Jennifer Lackey. Here are excerpts:
[Personal] transformations can be seen most clearly by considering the two ends of the spectrum of life. On the early side, it is often noted that the prefrontal cortex of the brains of adolescents is still developing, and so they are more likely than adults to act on impulse, engage in dangerous or risky behavior, and misread social cues and emotions. This raises a host of questions about the level of responsibility that juveniles bear for their crimes and the appropriate punishments that should be handed out to them. If the underdeveloped brains of adolescents at least partly explain their criminal behavior, then holding them fully responsible for their actions, and punishing them as adults, seems wildly off the mark.
On the later side of the spectrum, only 1 percent of serious crime is committed by people over the age of 60. According to Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University: "Everyone agrees on what is the most reliable predictor of recidivism: age. As people get older, they statistically become less dangerous." Turley refers to this period as "criminal menopause," a phenomenon that raises serious questions about the rationale for incarcerating the elderly. Still, researchers project that the elderly prison population in the United States will be over 400,000 in 2030, compared with 8,853 in 1981.
At the early end of the spectrum of life, then, there is the possibility that prisoners might change; at the later end, there is the reality that they have changed. Both facts bump up against natural life sentences. A sentence of "natural life" means that there are no parole hearings, no credit for time served, no possibility of release. Short of a successful appeal or an executive pardon, such a sentence means that the convicted will, in no uncertain terms, die behind bars.
Many types of arguments have been leveled against natural life sentences. Economic ones focus on the ballooning costs of mass incarceration and the toll this takes on government budgets, especially as the age and medical expenses of prisoners rapidly increase. Legal ones ask whether such sentences are cruel and unusual and therefore violate the Eighth Amendment, particularly for juveniles. Social arguments ask whether natural life sentences discourage reform by providing no incentive for rehabilitation. Moral concerns are grounded in the dignity and rights of prisoners, while psychological objections call attention to the myriad causes of deviant behavior and their responsiveness to appropriate treatment.
But one argument that is surprisingly absent from these conversations is an epistemic one that has to do with us. For natural life sentences say to all involved that there is no possible piece of information that could be learned between sentencing and death that could bear in any way on the punishment the convicted is said to deserve, short of what might ground an appeal. Nothing. So no matter how much a juvenile is transformed behind bars, and no matter how unrecognizable an elderly prisoner is from his earlier self, this is utterly irrelevant to whether they should be incarcerated. Our absence of knowledge about the future, our ignorance of what is to come, our lack of a crystal ball, is in no way a barrier to determining now what someone's life ought to be like decades from now.
Moreover, prisoners aren't the only ones who can change: victims and their families can come to see the convicted as being worthy of forgiveness and a second chance, and public attitudes can evolve, moving away from a zealous "war on crime" approach to one that sees much criminal activity as the result of broader social problems that call for reform. Even if we set aside the other arguments against natural life sentences — economic, legal, moral and so on — the question I want to ask here is this: how is it rational to screen off the relevance of this information? How, that is, is it rational to say today that there can be no possible evidence in the future that could bear on the punishment that a decades-from-now prisoner deserves?...
Notice that nothing in the epistemic argument here suggests that no prisoners should, in fact, spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars. Instead, the point is that rationality requires that we leave the epistemic door open to acquiring new information. Put bluntly, the argument says that it is irrational for the possibility of parole to be taken off the table at the outset of any sentence.
If Hume is right that "a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence," then our beliefs about the punishment a person deserves at any given time need to be sensitive to the evidence available at that time. But if we screen off huge amounts of potentially relevant information decades before the beliefs about what a prisoner deserves are even formed, then it is impossible for them to be proportioned to the evidence.
February 2, 2016 in Assessing Graham and its aftermath, Assessing Miller and its aftermath, Offender Characteristics, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (4)
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Highlighting the highlights of the Colson Task Force report on improving federal justce system
As reported in this recent post, last week the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections issued numerous recommendations to reform the federal criminal justice system in a big report titled Transforming Prisons, Restoring Lives. The helpful folks at Vice subsequently published this helpful overview of the report in an article headlined "A Bipartisan Congressional Panel Just Agreed on Ways to Send Fewer Americans to Prison." Here are excerpts:
Chief among the recommendations of the nine person, bipartisan Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections is sending fewer low-level drug offenders to federal prison, and sentencing offenders to far fewer years behind bars, which would reverse two of the changes that have driven the federal prison population to grow by 700 percent since 1980.
But the task force also dug into the minutiae of how the prison system is operated, including how it evaluates the success of its programs, the recidivism rate, and how it uses its resources. In their final report, members suggest that the prisons should actually devote more resources to addiction treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy, classes, and faith programs, and incentivize participation by offering offenders reducing time from their sentences and a "second look" at their cases by a federal judge after they've served certain number of years.
"If their behavior is good in the program, they've taken part in programs, they can have their sentence looked at again. It's an incentive to have people behave well and participate in programs that are evidence-based to improve behavior," said Laurie Robinson, a criminal justice professor and former Assistant Attorney General who served on the task force....
Robinson described her experience working with the task force as "terrific." Despite 30 years working in the criminal justice system, she said she learned both from the diverse viewpoints of her colleagues and the federal prisoners she met on site visits. "Some were in their late 60s or 70s, and at least one of those individuals was in very bad health and said he had applied several times for compassionate release," she said. "And it just made you think: Why are we spending so much in the way of taxpayer dollars to keep people behind bars?"...
Robinson and her colleagues were meeting with senior staff at the White House ... to brief them on the report and point out which actions could be taken without a Congressional vote or legislation. "There are things in there that the director of the BOP could do tomorrow, she said, noting that there are also steps the DOJ and president could take that focus on management, resource allocation, and best practices. Others of them I think might not happen necessarily quickly but maybe are things that will get into the public conversation that will have to happen at a later time," she said....
Going forward, the report says, sentences should be individualized, policy should emphasize public safety, data should guide policies, and the costs should be more carefully considered. Most importantly, the report says, the lawmakers who receive the recommendations "must capitalize on this rare moment in time" of political will and public awareness to make effective change.
Prior related post:
January 31, 2016 in Prisons and prisoners, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, January 28, 2016
California Gov Jerry Brown proposes state ballot initiative to expand parole and make other reforms
As reported in this Los Angeles Times article, headlined "Gov. Brown to seek November ballot initiative to relax mandatory prison sentences," the chief executive of the largest state in our Union is asking voters to give certain executives and judges more power to reduce state sentences after their imposition. Here are the basic details:
Almost four decades after he signed a law mandating strict sentences for the most serious crimes, Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday moved to ease its effect, proposing inmates convicted of nonviolent offenses be given a chance at early release. "Let's take the basic structure of our criminal law and say, when you've served fully the primary sentence, you can be considered for parole," Brown said in announcing a November ballot initiative to streamline the rules — one he estimated could affect thousands of current inmates.
Rather than change sentencing policy, the proposal would allow corrections officials to more easily award credits toward early release based on an inmate's good behavior, efforts to rehabilitate or participation in prison education programs. "It's well-balanced," Brown said. "It's thoughtful."
The effort is largely in response to the lingering effects of a 2009 federal order for California to reduce its prison population, Brown said. But he made clear that it also is meant to improve a criminal justice system that offers too few chances at rehabilitation. "By allowing parole consideration if they do good things," the governor said of some inmates, "they will then have an incentive … to show those who will be judging whether or not they're ready to go back into society."
Brown had been hinting for months that he was considering a key change in criminal justice policy, and consulted with a number of academics and inmate advocates on how to proceed. He was joined Wednesday by a handful of prominent law enforcement and religious leaders. While it was unclear whether they were ready to fully embrace each detail of the measure, they praised Brown's focus on weeding out those serving time for nonviolent offenses. "I think this will effectively open bed space for those who richly deserve to be there," Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said.
The initiative also would authorize the state parole board to consider early release for nonviolent inmates who complete a full sentence for their primary offense and it would require a judge to decide whether felons as young as 14 should be tried in juvenile or adult court. That final element of the initiative would undo a system approved by voters in 2000 that handed that power to prosecutors.
Once the measure is given a formal title and summary by the attorney general's office, Brown and his political team will need to gather more than 585,000 valid voter signatures to qualify it for the Nov. 8 statewide ballot. The governor likely has the needed resources: Campaign funds left over from his 2014 reelection bid and previous successful ballot measures total some $24 million....
Patrick McGrath, district attorney of Yuba County, said Brown's plan — by offering more pathways to parole — also may send the wrong message to crime victims who believe their perpetrators received a certain punishment. "Now, down the line, they're told 10 year [sentences] are not really 10 years," he said. "I think this is very, very corrosive to the faith that the public has ultimately in the criminal justice system." Loyola Law professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor, said the proposal would make a judge's sentence only a starting point. "People could be released from prison years earlier based on what the parole board wants to do," she said....
Of particular interest will be how Brown shapes the narrative of the political campaign in support of his parole initiative. The fall statewide ballot already is expected to be one of the longest in more than a decade, which will mean voters are deluged with a flood of advertisements, mailers and messages. The ballot also likely will feature other high-profile public safety debates, including a gun violence initiative promoted by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and perhaps dueling initiatives to either eliminate or strengthen California's death penalty.
Prof David Ball, who has researched and written a lot about California sentencing realities, provides a deeper dive into what all this could really mean in this Reality-Based Community post. Here is how this post starts:
Governor Jerry Brown introduced the Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016 (link to initiative text), a sentencing reform ballot initiative slated to appear on the November ballot. This is potentially huge news — if nothing else, it may signal that the political calculation on crime could be changing — but I have some caveats about how significant it could end up being. The PRSA expands the potential for parole release, expands good-time credits, and puts judges, not DA's, in charge of deciding whether a given juvenile offender can be tried in adult court.
The most significant part of the PRSA, in my opinion, is the expanded role of parole. California never quite did away with indeterminate sentencing, as I have written about here, reserving X-years-to-life sentences for non-capital murder, three strikes offenses, and some sex offenses. This proposal is definitively not a return to the Indeterminate Sentencing Law of the early 1970's, where sentences could be as vague as "one year to life." Instead, it makes all those who have served their primary (determinate) sentence eligible for parole. The key here is how primary sentence is defined: it "exclude[es] the imposition of an enhancement, consecutive sentence, or alternative sentence." As I wrote about here, (see this page for a link to the article and the data on sentencing), there are many people serving very long consecutive sentences (100 years plus). More importantly, the tail-wagging-the-dog enhancement structure of the California penal code means a lot of time actually served is from enhancements. I expect this to be the main source of pushback, since so much of plea bargaining is, in fact, charge bargaining, and so much of charge bargaining is about enhancements.
January 28, 2016 in Procedure and Proof at Sentencing, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (3)
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
"Congressionally Mandated Task Force Calls for Bold Transformation of Federal Corrections System"
The title of this post is the headline of this press release which summarized the contents and import of a new report released this morning by the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections. Here are excerpts from the press release (which includes a link to the report):
Today, the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections issued a set of bold recommendations to reform the federal justice system, enhance public safety, and save the government billions of dollars. In a new report, Transforming Prisons, Restoring Lives, the Congressionally mandated blue-ribbon panel released the findings of its year-long investigation into the nation's overcrowded and costly federal prisons....
"We have laid out a detailed roadmap of ambitious, consensus-based recommendations that place public safety first while reserving prison for those who truly need it," said task force chair, former Republican congressman from Oklahoma J.C. Watts, Jr. "If taken together, these reforms are projected to reduce the federal prison population by 60,000 people in the coming years and save more than $5 billion."
Congress established the bipartisan panel in 2014 in response to mounting concerns about the scale and cost of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which currently houses 197,000 people with a budget of almost $7.5 billion this year. Alan Mollohan, the task force's vice-chair, said that the seven-fold increase in the BOP's population since the 1980s is unsustainable.
"The BOP has been operating at crisis levels for decades," said Mollohan, a former Democratic congressman from West Virginia. "As a result, its policies and practices have not kept up with best practice in the field, presenting a missed opportunity to rehabilitate those who are confined in federal prisons and thus promote public safety."...
In the report, the task force recommends that the federal justice system move away from its current "one size fits all" approach to meting out punishment and delivering treatment and programs. Instead, they advise that sentencing decisions and correctional responses be based on the individual case–an approach grounded in research evidence as the most effective means of reducing recidivism.
Observing that prison is expensive and imposes tremendous harm to individuals, families, and communities, the Task Force recommends that prison sanctions be used sparingly and long terms of incarceration be reserved for only the most serious federal crimes. They advise incentivizing participation in programs that are proven to lower recidivism and increase the odds of success for individuals reentering society. And, in following the example of successful reforms in states like Texas, Utah, Georgia, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania, they advocate for a more diversified, evidence-based approach to criminal justice that delivers public safety at less cost.
In more specific terms, the Task Force recommends that:
- Mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses should be reserved for "drug kingpins"–those found to have served a leadership role in a large cartel;
- Program and treatment participation in prison should be incentivized through earned time off one's sentence; and
- The BOP should better assess the risks, needs, and assets of its population and align programming and treatment accordingly to reduce recidivism and enhance public safety.
Along with the release of this important report, J.C. Watts, the chair of the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections, authored this Washington Post commentary headlined "Prisons are full of low-level offenders. It's time to rethink federal sentencing laws.: Americans believe in redemption, but for too long, our reflexive reliance on incarceration has left us little room to show it."
January 26, 2016 in Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, Purposes of Punishment and Sentencing, Reentry and community supervision, Scope of Imprisonment, Who Sentences? | Permalink | Comments (4)