NOTE: LIGHT POSTING TODAY—DUE (HAPPILY) TO HOLIDAY SLOWDOWN….BUT….

ANYBODY GOT EARLY SIGN POSTS ON CRIME AND REALIGNMENT?

KPPC’S Julie Small reports that California’s prison population has dropped by 8000, mostly in response to California’s realignment strategy that began on Oct 1 and has resulted in the transfer of thousands of prisoners from state lock-up facilities to California’s counties.

Here’s a clip from Small’s report:

The number of inmates in California prisons has dropped by 8,000 since “realignment” took effect Oct. 1. Court papers state officials filed Thursday indicate the change. Officials reported the new numbers Thursday under a federal court order to reduce crowding in the prisons.

In its monthly status report to the court, officials said the state prison population dropped by 8,218 between Oct. 5 and Dec. 7.

California prison officials say the transfer of low-level felons to county officials that began in October will allow the state to meet a court-ordered reduction a month after a Dec. 27 deadline.

The state’s prison population has declined from a record high of 173,000 in 2006 to the current population of 135,000. But many prisons remain packed with almost twice the number of inmates they were designed to hold….

University of Ohio Law prof Doug Berman, of Sentencing, Law and Policy, also noted the drop and wondered in a post, if California was experiencing a “big new crime wave in California in recent months?”

The court order resulting in these prison reductions is the one upheld by the Supreme Courtin Plata earlier this year despite strenuous objections and dire warnings of Justices Alito and Scalia and others about a likely spike in crime as a result. I am thus wondering, given that it appears that California is going to be soon complying with this court order, if there is developing evidence of a new crime wave.

The question is particularly relevant in Los Angeles where approximately 40 percent of the “realigned” prisoners have landed, and will continue to land, causing a list of city officials like DA Steve Cooley and others to predict that crime will go up.

Admittedly, it hasn’t been all that long—nevertheless, do we have any early indications, one way or the other?

(NOTE: I can tell you that, far, overall crime is down this year over 2010, but I don’t, as yet, have a month by month breakdown for these past few months.

As Berman points out, nuanced analysis of crime stats would likely tell us a lot, because not every county and/or municipality is handling realignment the same way.

I sincerely hope that there is an on-going effort to track the public safety impact of the prison population reductions in California, especially because it seems that different localities are responding to the influx of former prisoners in different ways. The process of prison realignment is thus creating a kind of post-prison community reentry natural experiment, and I would expect spikes in crime to vary in different localities based on both the nature of the offenders returning to the community and also how the communities are responding to the return of these offenders.

Only a few months into the realignment plan, it is surely to early to have clear or conclusive evidence on the public safety consequences of Plata and its aftermath. Still I am very eager to hear any early reports, especially from anyone actively working on these issues, about what we might know on this front so far.

Yep. Me too.

60 MINUTES OCCUPIES THE BANKS AND THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

In the past months, CBS’s 60 Minutes has done a couple of excellent, aggressive and utterly enraging reports by Scott Pelley on the banking business, the mortgage crisis, and the like—asking repeatedly why the Justice Department hasn’t filed charges one any of these folks.

The most recent such report was this past Sunday.

The Occupy movement could do worse than to study these segments for talking points.

TEXAS MAN CONVICTED OF MURDERING WIFE, FREED AFTER 25 YEARS – PROSECUTORS WITHHELD CRUCIAL EVIDENCE

The LA Times Molly Hennessy-Fiske and David G. Savage have the story. Here’s how it opens:

The case of a grocery store clerk wrongly convicted of murdering his wife has rocked the legal system across Texas, and not just because an innocent man served 25 years of a life sentence.

Supporters of Michael Morton, who was set free in October, say he might never been convicted if a prominent prosecutor had shared significant evidence with the defense at the time of the trial.

“Mr. Morton was the victim of serious prosecutorial misconduct that … completely ripped apart his family,” said Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project in New York, which represented Morton in his appeal.

On Monday, Morton and his lawyers plan to ask District Judge Sid Harle to take action against the lead prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, now a county judge.

The case highlights what critics say has become a recurring problem in Texas and across the nation: prosecutors concealing evidence that could undercut their cases.

Yeah. Sign me on as one of those “critics.”

The ACLU of So Cal filed a racial profiling lawsuit against Glendale Unified School District, the Glendale Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and LA County Probation on Thursday having to do with a 2010 incident in which 56 Hoover High Hchool students were rounded up and questioned for an hour.

The suit names individual officers from the GPD, the LAPD, probation, plus administrators at Hoover HS for “racial profiling and unlawful search and seizure.”

The lawsuit is based on an incident that occurred on September 24, 2010, when, according to the ACLU, school administrators, working with police and school-based probation officers, rounded up 56 Latino students during their lunch period, herded them into classrooms, interrogated them—and in a bizarre touch—”orced them to pose for mock mug shots.”

Attorneys say that the students were targeted although there was no evidence that they were violating any laws or breaking school rules.

Here’s more from the ACLU statement:

“I was shocked and scared when I saw the police, especially because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong,” said sixteen-year-old Ashley Flores, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “It was the first encounter I’ve had with police. I’ve never been in trouble and have nothing to do with gangs.”

The students, all Latino, were eating lunch when school administrators ordered them into two classrooms, where armed GPD and LAPD officers were waiting for them. Police told the students that they could not leave until they provided information. When some protested that they had done nothing wrong, officers ordered them to “sit down and shut up,” and threatened to go to their homes at 6 a.m. to collect the information if they did not cooperate. The officers told students that their personal information would be kept in a file to identify them if they ever got in trouble. The students were detained between 30 and 90 minutes, causing some to miss their fifth-period classes.

“The police officers, school officials, and probation officers involved in this roundup targeted these students solely because they are Latino,” said David Sapp, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. “They acted as though being a Latino teenager is all the justification they needed to detain and threaten these students, which is a textbook case of racial profiling.”

One student who was eating lunch with the others, who is not Latino, was not detained in the classrooms.

Additionally, after the incident, Defendant Michael Rock, a captain in GPD who authorized the roundup, acknowledged that the students’ ethnicity was central in determining which students were detained, adding that GPD had planned to conduct a similar operation targeting Armenian students. [Italics mine.]

Nice.

The lawsuit sounds righteous, and there’s no excuse for racially profiling and terrorizing kids, yet it might help to have this bit of context:

According to the school website, Hoover High’s student population is around 42 percent Armenian American, and around one quarter Latino. In recent years, elements within the two ethnic groups have sometimes been violently at odds. The most tragic such event occurred in May of 2000 when 17-year-old Raul Aguirre was beaten with a crowbar then stabbed to death in front of the school just after classes ended for the day. Raul Aguirre, it seemed, was a non-troublemaker kid who had tried to intervene in a fight between the two ethnic factions, and was murdered for his trouble.

In any case, one assumes that there’s more to the story. Again, not that anything excuses the actions of the adults. However, additional information might at least, in part, explain the thinking of the cops and the Hoover High administrators.

AND IN OTHER NEWS:

CDCR SAYS CALIFORNIA’S PRISON HUNGER STRIKE HAS ENDED

The CDCR reported on Thursday that the mass hunger strike in the state’s prisons has ended. This is from their statement:

CDCR officials in Sacramento were contacted by inmates by letter on October 11. It was the first such contact by inmates or their representatives during the inmate-led action.

Officials agreed to meet with inmate representatives to discuss its ongoing review of and revisions to its Security Housing Unit (SHU) policies that began in May 2011. Similar to its discussions with inmates during a July hunger strike, all agreed the changes to policies would take several months to finalize. The department agreed to continue on its same course.

Inmates initiated a second hunger strike on September 26, and after three days, 4,252 inmates in eight state prisons had missed nine consecutive meals – the point at which CDCR considers an inmate to be on a hunger strike….

Last Friday, Ian Lovett reported for the NY Times that, unlike with the first strike in the summer, this time the hunger strikers were dug in and prepared to last as long as it took to get some of their demands met, so the change was unexpected.

Here’s a clip from last week’s story:

….since inmates resumed the strike last week in continued protest against conditions of prolonged isolation, things have gone differently: the corrections department has cracked down, trying to isolate the strike leaders, some of whom say they no longer trust the department and are hoping to push the governor to enact reforms.

“I’m ready to take this all the way,” J. Angel Martinez, one of the strike leaders at Pelican Bay State Prison, said in a message conveyed through a lawyer this week. “We are sick and tired of living like this and willing to die if that’s what it takes.”

This time, though, both sides have shown less inclination to compromise, and no negotiations between the strike leaders and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken place since the strike resumed.

An internal memo from George J. Giurbino, director of the Division of Adult Institutions for the department, outlined new, more aggressive processes for dealing with mass hunger strikes….

However, on Thursday, Lovett reported on how and why the strikers had agreed to begin eating again. Here’s a clip:

…after negotiations on Thursday between the corrections department and lawyers representing the inmates, strike leaders agreed to resume eating.

Corrections officials reiterated the reforms the department had agreed to at the end of the previous hunger strike in July, which they said would take several months to finalize, and “agreed to stay on its same course,” according to a news release from the department.

The department had already agreed to a review of its policies for placing inmates in security housing units.

But Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children who negotiated on behalf of the inmates, said that, most importantly, the department had agreed to review the cases of all prisoners already in isolation because of “validated” gang affiliation, rather than because of their behavior while in prison.

“This is the first time the prisoners had heard that kind of review was in the works,” Ms. Strickman said. “That new information, I believe, convinced them to end the hunger strike.”

In the last few weeks, the LA Times’ Robert Faturechi has been doing some fine and very welcome reporting on the issue of deputy abuse of inmates in the Los Angeles County Jails—which is important.

In Friday’s paper Faturechi tells of a young Sheriff’s deputy who says he was forced by his supervisor to beat a mentally disabled inmate in the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown L.A.

Here’s how the story opens:

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s rookie who graduated at the top of his recruit class resigned after only a few weeks on the job, alleging that a supervisor made him beat up a mentally ill jail inmate, according to interviews and law enforcement records.

The deputy, Joshua Sather, said that shortly before the inmate’s beating his supervisor said, “We’re gonna go in and teach this guy a lesson,” according to the records. The attack, Sather said, was then covered up.

Law enforcement records reveal that the incident caused tensions in the Sheriff’s Department. Sather’s uncle, a veteran sheriff’s detective, angrily confronted the supervisor about making his nephew “beat up ‘dings,’ ” slang for the mentally disabled. He then allegedly threatened to “put a bullet” in the supervisor’s head.

Sather’s case was pieced together by The Times from department sources as well as district attorney’s documents in which Sather’s uncle revealed his nephew’s allegations to investigators.

Sheriff’s officials launched an investigation and determined that an uncooperative inmate had been subdued by force, but concluded that no misconduct had occurred. They also asked the district attorney to review the uncle’s alleged threat, but prosecutors declined to file charges.

Sather’s allegation is among several first-hand accounts of unwarranted deputy violence against inmates in the nation’s largest jail system. Last week, two chaplains and a movie producer released sworn statements that they witnessed deputies abusing inmates. But Sather’s allegations are unusual because they come from within the department’s own ranks, from the point of view of a deputy.

AND WHILE WE’RE PRAISING THE LA TIMES, GEORGE SKELTON HAS A GOOD ESSAY ON ALL THE COMPLAINING OVER REALIGNMENT.

Here’s how it opens:

The boring, bureaucratic word “realignment” masks the truly dramatic change in locking up California criminals that Gov. Jerry Brown just pulled off.

“A lot of people say, ‘Hey, what’s new in Sacramento?’” Brown told a news conference last week. “Well, this is new. It’s bold. It’s difficult. And it will continuously change as we learn from experience.
But we can’t sit still and let the courts release 30,000 serious prisoners. We have to do something.”

In truth, the change was inevitable.

Either the state began to dump thousands of its lower-risk prisoners onto local custody or it would have been forced by federal courts to dump them on the streets.

“We’ve either got to reduce the prison population or release 10,000 inmates by Christmas Eve,” says Matthew Cate, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “That’s [equal to] two prisons.”

Complainers — such as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — are being disingenuous, at best.

Villaraigosa called a news conference Monday to denounce the state for not providing “a single dollar to help with the burden” of incarcerating and monitoring more criminals. “That is not alignment. That is political malpractice.”

Not quite. The state is sending financial help to the counties, including $124 million to Los Angeles County. It’s up to the cities to request a share. The mayor has privately told people that he won’t “go begging” to county supervisors for money, according to one state official who requested anonymity because he was reporting a private conversation.

My favorite hyperbole, however, comes from Republican State Sen. Sharon Runner of the Antelope Valley: “Now is the time for Californians to get a dog, buy a gun and install an alarm system. The state of California is no longer going to protect you.”

Let’s be honest: The politicians and the voters simply could not continue their decades-long insistence on increasing criminal sentences and enlarging the prison population without raising the money to pay for more cells and guards.

PROBATION CHIEF DON BLEVINS SAYS DEPARTURE IS VOLUNTARY

Chief Blevins told KPCC’s Larry Mantle on Thursday’s Air Talk show that he is leaving Probation to…spend more time with his family.

The Daily News has a story on Blevins’ and his remarks. But you can also listen to the show, which included Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

Among other things, Blevins said that he expects Probation to meet—or to nearly meet—all of the 41 reforms in the County’s juvenile camps required by the Department of Justice by October 31, whereas sources who work in an around the camps say this is simply not true, that the County won’t come close.

We’ll know which point of view was more factual very soon.

Zev Yaroslavsky said bluntly and quite rightly that kids in the Probation camps are simply not being given the mental health care or the education that they need.

Yaroslavsky also mentioned that probation needs a large cultural change “so that people [in probation] are expected to work for the hours that they are paid.

Doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

SCREENING FOR REALIGNMENT PAROLEES MAY NOT BE ALL THAT ACCURATE SAYS ZEV’S BLOG

Zev’s blog reports that cases are coming through where the so-called Non, Non, Nons—people who have committed non serious, non violent, non sexual crimes—have larger crimes in their background, or inmates who should not be in the category are being accidentally sent through for county supervision when in reality they should be high control parolees.

The blog reports that the Probation Department is doing it’s own screening.

Let’s hope so. The realignment strategy is a necessary change, but to avoid problems there has to be quality control in the screening process. Otherwise we got trouble.

Last week WitnessLA reported (based on the word of multiple inside sources) that Probation Chief Donald Blevins had been informed the week before that his tenure in LA County Probation was over; he was being given the boot.

When other news outlets, like KPCC, called Probation to confirm our report they were told no such firing had take place. (Never mind that we know that Blevins’ employment situation was as we reported it.)

Now on Tuesday morning, the Supervisors will meet in a closed door session, the purpose being, according to their agenda, for: Interview and consideration of candidate for appointment to the position of Chief Probation Officer.

Last week Spokesperson Kerry Webb did confirm another pesky rumor—namely that last week Blevins left for a vacation that “had been planned months in advance ” reported the LA Times.

There was some muttering in and around some of the supervisors’ offices about the wisdom of the Probation Chief planning a vacation that kicked in just days before Los Angeles was to get an influx of parolees from the state to be overseen by LA County Probation.

But whatever. The beat goes on. More soon.

SINCE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF REALIGNMENT, MORE CITY OFFICIALS ARE PREDICTING DOOM AND GLOOM

The LA Times’ Joel Rubin and Andrew Blankstein report that the LAPD will be additionally burdened by the realignment parolees and that the mayor and others have expressed concern while a Governor’s aide calls all this public worrying political posturing.

Who is correct remains to be seen, although I do notice that, according to the article, the City of LA is predicting a much larger number of parolees to come to LA before the end of the year than the actual CDCR numbers reflect. Not sure what’s up with that.

THOUSANDS OF CALIFORNIA INMATES RENEW HUNGER STRIKE, AND THE CDCR INVESTIGATES TWO STRIKE ATTORNEYS

I’m playing catch up on this story, but the very knowledgeable Michael Montgomery from California Watch
is doing great coverage. Here’s an excerpt from his latest.

Just days after thousands of California inmates renewed a hunger strike, two Bay Area attorneys closely involved in mediation efforts got a surprise: They were under investigation by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for allegations of misconduct and unspecified security threats.

The attorneys – Marilyn McMahon, executive director of California Prison Focus, and Carol Strickman of Legal Services for Prisoners With Children – have been banned from state institutions until the investigation is resolved, according to temporary exclusion orders signed by Corrections Undersecretary Scott Kernan on Sept. 29.

The investigation will determine whether the attorneys “violated the laws and policies governing the safe operations of institutions within the CDCR,” the order states.

The document does not provide details about the allegations.

SANDY BANKS ON SHERIFF LEE BACA AND THE JAILS ABUSE SCANDAL

Yesterday, I missed linking to Sandy Banks’ excellent and very welcome column about Sheriff Baca and the growing jails abuse scandal. If you’ve already seen it, great. If not, it’s a BIGTIME must read. Banks lays it all out for the Sheriff, with no punches pulled. For his sake as well as ours, I hope he is listening.

WHERE TO WATCH TUESDAY’S IPHONE 5 APPLESTRAVAGANZA

YES, it is presumed that the iPhone 5 is launching Tuesday at 10 am Pacific (not just the undramatic iPhone 4s).

And NO this is not a social justice issue.

It’s an Apple cult issue.

So if you too are a cult member, here’s where you can find out where to follow real-time commentary and/or live streaming.

The hunger strike that began on July 1 at the Pelican Bay SHU eventually spread to somewhere between 1700 to 6600 prisoners in 13 of the state’s prisons, according to the SF Chron.

Now that the strike has ended, it is unclear what it has accomplished since, as the LA Times pointed out in an editorial last week, the CDCR won’t let reporters into the SHU to talk to any of the prisoners.

However one measurable effect the strike has had is to stimulate articles about solitary and whether we ought to be engaging in the practice.

The very best of the Op Eds on the topic is an excellent editorial from the NY Times. Here is a big clip:

Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning goes.

As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called “supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.

Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated in the Security Housing Unit are “the worst of the worst.” Yet often it is the most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up in indefinite isolation. Placement is haphazard and arbitrary; it focuses on those perceived as troublemakers or simply disliked by correctional officers and, most of all, alleged gang members. Often, the decisions are not based on evidence.

Also notable are the letters to the editor that came a few days later. I’ve included a fragment of one of them:

Re “Barbarous Confinement,” by Colin Dayan (Op-Ed, July 18):

Mr. Dayan vividly captures the cruelty of long-term solitary or “supermax” confinement, which has increasingly become business as usual in American prisons. Supermax units like the one at Pelican Bay State Prison in California cost two to three times as much to build and operate as conventional prisons, and prisoners released directly to the community from solitary are more likely to commit more crimes than comparable prisoners released from general prison populations.

Fortunately, some states are beginning to change course. In Maine, the new commissioner of corrections has cut the population of the state’s supermax unit by more than half. Mississippi depopulated its supermax unit and eventually closed it entirely, leading to a dramatic drop in prison violence and a savings of $8 million a year….

Interesting that conservative states like Mississippi are reforming their SHUs, while liberal California cling to the concept.

FRANK SOTOMEYOR WRITES ABOUT THE DEATH OF PRIZE WINNING JOURNALIST GEORGE RAMOS

The essay appears in LA Observed.

NOTE: I had a late event on Sunday night, hence the short post. More later today.

WHY ARE WE SO STUCK?

While policymakers from both sides of the aisle in conservative states such as Texas, Mississippi and Kentucky, plus such red/blue states as Louisiana, are embracing sentencing reform and alternatives to incarceration, liberal California has somehow found serious reform impossible.

This week, Marisa Lagos of the San Francisco Chronicle has an excellent front page story on the “political paralysis” in the Democrat-dominated state legislature over incarceration policy reform.

Here are some clips:

As California deeply cut spending for public schools, social services and health programs in recent years, state leaders also found themselves grappling with a court order to reduce the prison population by tens of thousands of inmates.

Some civil rights groups and criminal justice experts are now seizing on this perfect storm of chronic deficits and crowded prisons to push for wide-ranging changes to the state’s sentencing laws that would transform California’s handling of crime and punishment. The California chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups want the state to reduce drug possession and low-level, nonviolent property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, and they want more community-based alternatives to incarceration.

Yet even modest changes have trouble getting legislative support from Republicans and Democrats alike in California – even as bipartisan groups of policymakers in conservative states such as Texas, Mississippi and Kentucky embrace sentencing reform and alternatives to incarceration.

“There’s a political paralysis here – people are afraid,” said former state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, whose 2007 bill to create an independent sentencing commission passed the Senate but failed in the Democratic-dominated Assembly. “I think it’s a false fear, but they are afraid of being labeled soft on crime, so they legislate by sound bite. They don’t take up the big issues, so years pass and we are in the same predicament.”

THE POWER OF THE PROSECUTORS

One of the more interesting points made in the story, is this one made by UC Berkeley’s Barry Krisberg, who is terrifically knowledgeable and does not pull punches;

Barry Krisberg, a criminal justice expert at UC Berkeley, said the California District Attorneys Association has enormous sway over lawmakers and opposes most sentencing changes. He noted that the federal government and 23 states have sentencing commissions, which tend to increase penalties for violent crimes and decrease penalties for nonviolent offenses.

“The question is, what’s wrong with us? Are we more conservative than Virginia? Are we more irrational than North Carolina?” he said. “It’s the politics, and it’s the dilemma of this state. … Unlike almost all the other states, we have been unable to get the two parties to sit down and cut a deal. It’s not the prison guards – they are not standing in the way. It’s not victims’ rights groups. It’s really the District Attorneys Association.”

The tide nationally, however, is clearly changing. The question is, will California get it together to be a front runner in reform? Or will we be the negative example that other states try to avoid?

FIRST MEDICALLY INCAPACITATED INMATE TO BE RELEASED UNDER NEW CALIF. LAW

Marisa Lagos and the SF Chron appear to be on a roll as they also have this article about Craig Lemke, a 48 year old 3-striker who is so medically incapacitated that prison officials say he will be a threat to nobody. On Wednesday, a parole board decided to release Lemke with a savings of $750,000 a year in Lemke’s guarding costs alone. That’s before we count the cost of Lemke’s medical care.

Lemke is only one of a list of 40 inmates who are permanently incapacitated due to illness or injury to the point that they cannot engage in the basics of daily life.The CDCR incarcerates and cares for them at an estimated cost of $200 million.

AND SPEAKING OF INMATES AND MEDICAL CARE, THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE HAS A THING OR TWO TO SAY

I’ve pasted a clip below, but the whole report is very much worth reading:

Read on!

On Tuesday, the governor and the California Department of Corrections announced their collective plan to reduce the state’s prison population— and it comes down to one single word: REALIGNMENT.

The plan was, as most of you know, put forth in answer to last month’s Supreme Court ruling mandating that California lower its inmate numbers by 33,000.

Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate Matt Cate called realignment the “cornerstone” of the state’s proposed methods to solve a chronic and severe overcrowding problem that, according to the Supremes, produced “serious constitutional violations” and endangered both inmates and guards.

Realignment is just that—a realigning of which prisoners go to state prison, and which instead remain with the various counties.

Here’s how the CDCR explains it:

Under Realignment, the state will continue to incarcerate offenders who commit serious, violent, or sexual crimes and counties will supervise, rehabilitate and manage low-level offenders using a variety of tools. It is anticipated that realignment will reduce the prison population by tens of thousands of low-level offenders over the next three years.

A bill to authorize realignment was passed in Aprilbut has languished since then for lack of funding.

As the AP reports:

The shift cannot take effect unless local governments get the money to provide jail cells and rehabilitation services, and funding for that remains stalled in the Legislature. Republican lawmakers have blocked Brown’s proposal for an extension of temporary tax increases that are set to expire by the end of this month.

Renewing the recent increases in the vehicle, sales and personal income taxes is essential to funding Brown’s plan to shift low-level offenders to county jurisdiction.

Whether realignment gets funded or not, one thing that Cate made extremely clear was that, whatever California’s response to the ruling, it “does not include the early release of inmates.”

OPERATION “BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY’ GANG CRACK DOWN

On Tuesday morning, a large federal law enforcement action targeted the Varrio Azusa 13 street gang. The action— literarily titled “Operation Bright Lights Big City”—marks “only the second time in history that federal civil rights laws have been used against members of a criminal street gang, ” said a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office.

LA Weekly’s Dennis Romero has more:

The indictment alleges the gang was run on the principle that members “will harass and use violence to drive African-Americans out of the City of Azusa and .. use violence in order to prevent African-Americans from moving into the city.”

How did they allegedly try to make their brown gang Utopia a reality? Graffiti, beatings, and robberies, prosecutors say. A black high school student was even beaten on his way home from school in last spring — just because he’s African American.

The U.S. Attorney in L.A., Andre Birotte Jr:

The Azusa 13 gang waged a campaign of hate during a two-decade crime spree in which African-Americans were harassed and attacked. We hope that this federal case will signal the end of this racist behavior and will help vindicate all of the victims who have suffered over the years.

NOTE: LIGHT BLOGGING TODAY.

This week the Pew Center on the States delivered another of its large and important reports on the state of incarceration in America.

it’s called State of Recidivism: The Revolving Door of American Prisons.

(In the past, the Pew Center has looked at how many Americans are behind bars, and who those Americans were in terms of age and ethnicity.)

This time, Pew focused on the frequency with which those who are imprisoned and later released into American communities return to prison.

PEW broke out the figures state by state, in order to look at which states had the highest return rate.

The two winners—if you can call them that—are Minnesota and, of course, our own prison benighted state. But, while both Minnesota and California have return rates that hover around 60 percent, MN has a prison population of slightly over 5,000, we have close to 120,000 men and women behind bars.

Also, as Pew notes, the majority of those Californians who return to prison, don’t go back for a new crime, but for a technical violation of their parole.

It doesn’t help, said Adam Gelb, director of Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project, that many states, California among them, do not incentivize parolees making a successful transition from prison to becoming a productive community member.

Here’s what Gelb told CNN:

Right now, incentives are mostly backwards. When offenders are breaking rules, supervising agencies win by sending them back to prison and getting them off their caseloads. That needs to be flipped so agencies get rewarded with a share of savings when they reduce returns to prison,” Gelb said.

YES, BUT DOES IT MAKE US SAFER?

One of the things the PEW researchers looked at with this report is public safety. Are we safer because we send so many people back to prison over and over again? PEW says no. Those states like New York and Oregon that have worked to provide the kind of programs, interventions and alternative sentencing that decreases recidivism, have seen their crime rates drop.

And of course there is the money savings. According to PEW, if California cut its recidivism rate by 10 percent, it would save the state at least $233 million. (Likely the savings would be substantially more since PEWs was working with 2005 prison prices.)

Prisons are often the forgotten
element of the criminal justice
system until things go badly. Catching the
guy and prosecuting him is really important
work, but if we don’t do anything with that
individual after we’ve got him, then shame
on us. If all that effort goes to waste and
we just open the doors five years later, and
it’s the same guy walking out the door and
the same criminal thinking, we’ve failed in
our mission.”

Minnesota Commissioner of Corrections Tom Roy
April 7, 2011

CAN OREGON’S MODEL BE….WELL….A MODEL?

The PEW study points to Oregon as being one the states that has been the most successful at intelligently addressing the recidivism problem. But can methods used in a less populous, less diverse state like Oregon be re-tailored to fit places like Florida and California?

If our lawmakers had the will it would be nice to find out. In any case, here’s an overview of Oregon’s strategy:

Read the rest of this entry »

COULD THE COPS HAVE STOPPED FLOR MEDRANO’S KILLER?

In mid-November of 2009, Flor Medrano, a 30-year-old housekeeper and mother of a 3-year-old, sought protection from her murderous stalker boyfriend at the Wilshire Division of the LAPD. Two officers went home with her and watched her front door from an unmarked police car. But the killer was already inside Medrano’s apartment. He stabbed her repeatedly and fatally before the cops could reach her. [Go here for back story.]

The LA Times Joel Rubin has taken another look at the case, using police reports, DA’s office records, and police commission reports, official review findings and more

The result is a story that is both tragic and clarifying.

Rubin writes:

There seems to be no doubt that the officers tried to do right by a woman who had come to them for help. But a routine internal investigation led LAPD officials to soon question the decisions made that night. As the inquiry progressed, the early praise increasingly seemed misplaced.

Read the rest.

THE SUPREMES DECIDED MONDAY’S CASES WHILE PRACTICING THEIR STAND UP ACTS?

The Supreme Court decided a bunch of things on Monday. For instance, they ruled that, the Citizens United case notwithstanding, corporations are not people too, at least when it comes to personal privacy rights.

They kinda backed away from ruling on the kids-and-the-fourth-amendment issue that I posted about yesterday. They ruled—mostly that they weren’t going to rule, that there was no necessity to do so. (Youth Today has perhaps the best rundown on that case.)

However, Slate’s refreshingly smart Dahlia Lithwick analyzes the day in terms of the mood among the justices—and the quality of Justice Roberts’ one liners.

When Loki, the god of constitutional mischief, is in the right frame of mind, the Supreme Court can be a fantastically fun place to be. With all the talk of judicial bitterness, anger, and recriminations, it’s easy to forget how much fun life tenure can be. Today is just one of those days.

Things get off to a warm and fuzzy start as the justices hand down three unanimous opinions. Unanimous! One is a ruling in favor of an Army reservist in his employment discrimination claim. The second hands a big win to a veteran who filed his benefits claim late. And the third involves AT&T’s claim that, for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act, it should be entitled to withhold information that might violate the company’s “personal privacy.”

Now, as you may recall, oral argument did not go all that well for the company that only really wanted to be treated like a real, live boy. And so it was, perhaps, no surprise that the Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that corporations do not have such a thing as “personal privacy” for the purposes of FOIA. What was surprising was Chief Justice John Roberts’ unanimous opinion for the court, which contains more laugh lines than Two and a Half Men—and half the coke.

CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS MOVES MANY MILLIONS OUT OF PRISON REHAB PROGRAMS—BUT DOES SO, VERY, VERY QUIETLY

Michael Montgomery filed this report for California Watch over a month ago, but it largely flew under the radar. However, it deserves attention.

Here’s how it opens:

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation quietly transferred millions of dollars out of beleaguered rehabilitation programs last year to cover shortfalls in other areas like prison security.

In all, the department moved around $70 million from the adult programming budget, in addition to $250 million that was previously cut from education, drug rehabilitation and other programs, according to a report released by the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“The department frequently and purposely reduces program services — such as offender rehabilitation programs and prison maintenance — to ‘free up’ funding to support increased prison security costs,” the report states. “This means that CDCR is not performing critical functions for which funding was specifically provided in the budget.”

Yeah, that’s smart. Cut the programs that will help keep people OUT of prison, thus lower our prison costs at the root.

Meanwhile, as the LA Times reported Wednesday, we’re housing a pile of expensively sick and incapacitated inmates. Certainly wouldn’t want the legislature to straighten its spine and vote to save money by releasing them. (Why be logical.)

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF STUCK-ON-STUPID BUDGETING…..HOUSE REPUBS CUT FUNDS FOR THE NATION’S MOST SUCCESSFUL VOLUNTEER PROGRAMS

This clip from Monday’s NY Times editorial speaks for itself:

House Republicans voted to eliminate the Corporation for National and Community Service and the $1.4 billion in federal funds it would provide to programs that encourage Americans to serve in their communities and around the nation, including AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Teach for America, City Year, Foster Grandparents and others.

If the federal funds are snatched away, some of these programs will lose matching private contributions from individuals, foundations and corporations, as well as money from localities. Some may have to close down.

Now there’s a great way to balance the budget: cut the small ticket item that actually lets us stretch our dollars. Brilliant.

BROWN WANTS TO SHUT DOWN THE STATE’S JUVENILE PRISONS, BUT SHOULD WE?

The short answer is YES. They’re preposterously expensive and they’re a mess that seems immune to fundamental reform.

However, shutting them down must be done wisely or it will simply result in more kids being tried as adults and so shoved instead into the adult prison system, as the Bakersfield Californian points out in an editorial.

The plan doesn’t appear to provide clear safeguards that would keep juveniles convicted of lesser crimes out of adult prisons. What if the counties, deep in their own budget problems, can’t accommodate them? Will these kids end up in adult facilities? Will counties lean toward prosecuting more youth offenders as adults to avoid having to house them? Will they be tempted to not prosecute them at all?

The NY Times also looks at some of the disagreement on the issue:

Joaquin E. DiazDeLeon, a former Fresno gang member, spent two years inside California’s juvenile prison system. What he found there, he said, was no better than the streets he came from.

Instead of rehabilitating young offenders, he said, correctional officers spent most of their time separating rival gangs. Violence was so pervasive, he said, that he kept his gang affiliation just to protect himself.

“Basically you’re being thrown in a box and expected to change,” said Mr. DiazDeLeon, 21, now a student at City College of San Francisco.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent proposal to eliminate California’s Division of Juvenile Justice was billed as a way to cut $242 million from the state budget. It was also the culmination of a decade-long effort to shut the state’s troubled youth prison system, which for years has been plagued by violence, abuse and decaying facilities.

CLARENCE THOMAS FAILED TO DISCLOSE WIFE’S EARNINGS

The LA Times’ Kim Geiger has this head-shaker of a story. Here’s the opening:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report his wife’s income from a conservative think tank on financial disclosure forms for at least five years, the watchdog group Common Cause said Friday.

Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records. Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years, instead checking a box labeled “none” where “spousal noninvestment income” would be disclosed.

Common Cause also says that Ginny Thomas was paid a salary in 2009 by a group called Liberty Central. But again in 2009, Justice Thomas checked the “NONE” box.

“Without disclosure, the public and litigants appearing before the court do not have adequate information to assess potential conflicts of interest, and disclosure is needed to promote the public’s interest in open, honest and accountable government,” Common Cause President Bob Edgar wrote in a letter to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

Do we think this is an oversight? Nope. Not really. One year maybe. But six? Although it’s admittedly hard to know what exactly Thomas was thinking with such a bone-headed move.

THE CLEMENCY QUESTION OF HAMEDAH HASAN

Lisa Ruth, at the not normally bleeding-heart-liberal Washington Times, asks—quite rightly—why President Obama hasn’t given clemency to Hamedah Hasan, the mother and grandmother whose case typifies the nation’s War on Drugs sentencing madness.

Ruth writes that presidential commutations are rare, but that sometimes justice demands them:

One stand-out in the more than 3,000 requests for Presidential commutation is Hamedah Hasan, a mother and grandmother serving her 17th year of a 27 year federal prison sentence for non-violent crack cocaine conviction. She has no prior criminal record.

In 1991, Ms. Hasan was arrested for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, after three other known drug traffickers implicated her as the “manager” of the conspiracy to sell 5.9 kilograms of crack cocaine. They received lighter sentences for their cooperation with authorities. Police never found any drugs on Ms. Hasan, nor did they find any drugs in her house. Despite repeated stake-outs, they did not observe her selling, using, or possessing drugs of any kind.

Mandatory federal sentencing guidelines put Ms. Hasan in jail for life. The requirements at the time included a 100:1 ratio for crack cocaine to regular cocaine. In other words, if you had one gram of crack, your punishment was equal to having 100 grams of cocaine.

Changes in the Sentencing Guidelines later reduced her sentence to 27 years.

Ms. Hasan has applied for Presidential commutation of her sentence, and has received an outpouring of support.

The ACLU now represents Ms. Hasan due to the strength of her argument. The application included more than 50 letters of support from community leaders, prison chaplains, advocates, friends and family.

One letter is from the federal judge who sentenced Ms. Hasan, the Honorable Richard G. Kopf, U.S. District of Nebraska. Part of his letter reads:

“…I can say, without equivocation, that Ms. Hasan is deserving of the President’s mercy. I have never supported such a request in the past, and I doubt that I will support another one in the future. That said, in this unique case, justice truly cries out for relief.”

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF IMPRISONMENT, THE LATEST ON BRADLEY MANNING AND HIS SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

The Guardian has the story. As you read the clip below, remind yourself that Manning has been kept in solitary confinement for six months—although he has yet to be convicted of anything at all.

Supporters of Bradley Manning, the army private suspected of leaking confidential documents to WikiLeaks, were thwarted in an attempt to deliver a petition protesting his treatment when US Marines took a sudden interest in traffic law.

David House, a friend of Manning’s, and Jane Hamsher, founder of the Firedoglake blog, were stopped by guards at the Quantico Marine Corp base in Virginia where Manning is being held, on Sunday when House planned to make a regular visit to see Manning.

The pair also wanted to deliver a petition with 42,000 signatures protesting at the conditions Manning is being held under, including solitary confinement and round-the-clock watch which his lawyers describe as unfair and abusive.

But despite having visited the base to see Manning on several previous occasions, yesterday the pair were stopped by military police and Hamsher’s car impounded after guards found the vehicle’s license plates had expired and Hamsher was unable to produce insurance papers.

After nearly two hours the pair were released – but too late to see Manning during the military brig’s visiting hours, denying the prisoner of his sole weekly respite from solitary confinement.