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:
….Much of the increase in the prisoner census is a result of the “War on Drugs” and our country’s failure to treat addiction and mental illness as medical conditions. The natural history of these diseases often leads to behaviors that result in incarceration. The medical profession has the chance both to advocate for changes in the criminal justice system to reduce the number of people behind bars who would be better served in community-based treatment and to capitalize on the tremendous public health opportunities for diagnosing and treating disease and for linking patients to care after release.
Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill over the past 50 years and severe punishment for drug users starting in the 1970s have shifted the burden of care for addiction and mental illness to jails and prisons. The largest facilities housing psychiatric patients in the United States are not hospitals but jails. More than half of inmates have symptoms of a psychiatric disorder as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), and major depression and psychotic disorders are four to eight times as prevalent among inmates as in the general population — yet only 22% of state prisoners and 7% of jail inmates receive mental health treatment while incarcerated.