Firearm Access Heightens Risk of Homicide/Suicide…Worthwhile Editorials…Private Prison Group Donates Max to Brown’s Campaign…and Sheriff Candidate Updates

ACCESS TO GUNS DOUBLES AND TRIPLES RISK OF BEING MURDERED AND COMMITTING SUICIDE, RESPECTIVELY, SAYS SURVEY

People who have access to firearms are two times more likely to be killed, and three times more likely to commit suicide, according to a new analysis of a number of gun violence studies. Author Andrew Anglemyer and colleagues at UC San Francisco conducted a large-scale review of data from California (and other states), the United States, and other countries.

Reuter’s Andrew Seaman has more on the study. Here’s a clip:

For the new review, the researchers analyzed 14 studies that looked at the risk of committing suicide among people who did and didn’t have access to guns and five studies that looked at gun access and the risk of being murdered. Four of the studies examined both suicide and murder risk.

The studies were published between 1988 and 2005. All but one found people with access to firearms had heightened risks of dying from suicide and murder.

“Most analyses will find some conflicting studies,” Anglemyer told Reuters Health. “That’s not at all what we see here.”

The researchers found having access to a gun was tied to a three-fold increase in the likelihood that people would kill themselves.

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). About 12 out of every 100,000 people commit suicide each year.

Anglemyer’s team also found about a two-fold increased risk of death from murder among people who had access to a gun, compared to those without access to firearms. For women, the increased risk of being killed was even higher.

Here’s a clip from the abstract:

Firearms cause an estimated 31 000 deaths annually in the United States. Data from the 16-state National Violent Death Reporting System indicate that 51.8% of deaths from suicide in 2009 (n = 9949) were firearm-related; among homicide victims (n = 4057), 66.5% were firearm-related. Most suicides (76.4%) occurred in the victims’ homes. Homicides also frequently occurred in the home, with 45.5% of male victims and 74.0% of female victims killed at home.

Firearm ownership is more prevalent in the United States than in any other country; approximately 35% to 39% of households have firearms, and 22% of persons report owning firearms. The annual rate of suicide by firearms (6.3 suicides per 100 000 residents) is higher in the United States than in any other country with reported data, and the annual rate of firearm-related homicide in the United States (7.1 homicides per 100 000 residents) is the highest among high-income countries (4). Results from ecological studies suggest that state restrictions on firearm ownership are associated with decreases in firearm-related suicides and homicides (5).

…The apparent increased risk for suicide associated with firearms in the home is not unique to persons with a history of mental illness (7) and may be more of an indicator of the ease of impulsive suicide.

Impulsiveness may be a catalyst in using a firearm to commit suicide and may also play a role in firearm-related homicide. Researchers have estimated higher odds of homicide victimization among women than men (9–10). Because most homicide victims know their perpetrators (9), this finding may indicate an impulsive reaction to domestic disputes.

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TWO INTERESTING EDITORIALS FROM THE LA AND NY TIMES

A new LA Times editorial takes a look at “pay-for-success” financing for social programs—in which a non-profit and/or private enterprise put up money and run such programs as, say, helping prisoners successfully reenter their communities. If they are effective, they are then repaid with government money. Various states are experimenting with the idea, including California, but there may be pitfalls. Here’s a clip:

The cornerstone of criminal justice reform is the belief that offenders leaving prison could be prevented from committing new crimes and getting locked up all over again, if only government could find the right social service organization to provide the right programming. Crime would drop, some prisons could close and taxpayers would save money.

First, though, officials have to identify rehabilitation programs that work, and that means evaluating claims and evidence offered by competing providers, and perhaps making so many wrong choices before landing on the right one that the effort hardly seems worth it. Even elected officials and high-ranking bureaucrats who believe in criminal justice reform are skittish about trying something new, so they often give in to their colleagues who prefer costly and unsuccessful but comfortably familiar policies on sentencing, imprisonment and parole.

But what if someone else agrees to take all the risk? What if some outsider — a nonprofit service provider, let’s say, or a charitable foundation, or maybe even a commercial bank — raises the funds, runs the program, produces the results, then gets reimbursed with public money only after presenting verified proof of success?

Later this year, analysts will publish results of an experiment along those lines begun in 2010 at Peterborough Prison outside London. The social impact bond project, as this kind of financing and problem-solving innovation is often called, uses money put up by investors and managed by a nonprofit group, which contracts with another organization to provide recently released inmates with mentoring and other services intended to break the cycle of re-offending.

If an independent evaluator confirms that the program “worked,” as defined by agreed-upon criteria for decreasing new convictions — and preliminary analyses are encouraging — the British government will repay the investors’ capital plus an agreed-upon premium. If the success targets aren’t met, the investors eat the costs and the taxpayers owe nothing.

Yesterday, we pointed to a story about the US immigration lock-up quota (34,000 detainees). A strongly-worded NY Times editorial says the billions spent on detention and border patrol is wasteful and ineffective, and downright damaging to immigrant families. Here’s a clip:

It is mindless to keep throwing billions at border enforcement and detention at a time when illegal immigration is at historic lows, when other, more pressing government functions are being starved and when none of the money spent actually goes toward solving the problem.

Take the irrational obligation to fill all those detention beds, at a cost of about $122 a day. Why make the people who run a vast and expensive law-enforcement apparatus responsible for keeping prison beds warm rather than communities safe — especially when there are low-cost alternatives to detention that don’t involve fattening the bottom lines of for-profit prison corporations?

Congress’s arbitrary detention mandates and the Obama administration’s aggressive use of its enforcement powers have pushed deportations to record levels of 400,000 a year. This has had no discernible effect on the overall problem, but it has caused abundant anguish in immigrant families and their communities.

What’s most disheartening about the spending splurge is that it attacks only the symptoms of the ailing immigration system…

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FOR-PROFIT PRISON COMPANY GIVES MAXIMUM DONATION TO GOV. BROWN’S REELECTION CAMPAIGN

The private prison company GEO Group has already maxed out their legal limit for donations to Governor Jerry Brown’s campaign for reelection, donating a total of $54,400. While Gov. Brown’s recently released budget proposal banks on federal judges pushing back their prison overcrowding deadline by two years, $500M was still set aside to send more than 17,000 inmates to private prisons like GEO Group (practitioner of alarming profit-making “lock-up quotas”). (Read the backstory here.)

The LA Times’ Paige St. John has the latest on the Gov. Brown prison saga. Here’s a clip:

Labor unions, Hollywood’s glitterati, California philanthropists and a private company profiting from Gov. Jerry Brown’s fight over prison crowding are among 72 top donors who have maxed out on contributions to Brown’s reelection campaign even before he officially runs.

Brown’s campaign fund reports receiving two $27,200 checks in early January from the GEO Group, based in Boca Raton, Fla. The company in September signed contracts with the state worth $150 million to house 1,400 inmates in two low-security facilities within California, in Adelanto and in McFarland. That’s more than double the $25,900 that GEO gave to Brown late in the 2010 race, an amount it also gave to Brown’s competitor, Meg Whitman.

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BOB OLMSTED TO RELEASE PLAN TO REFORM SHERIFF’S DEPT.

LA County Sheriff hopeful Bob Olmsted will be holding a press conference today (Wednesday) at 11AM outside of Men’s Central Jail to reveal his plan for reforming the department, should he be elected. (We’ll have more on the details tomorrow.)

(And, by the way, former Undersheriff/Sheriff candidate Paul Tanaka was interviewed on KFI’s John and Ken Show on Tuesday evening. It’s…very lively, and not something you’d want to miss. Trust us.)

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SUPES SCHEDULE ANOTHER CLOSED-DOOR MEETING TO DISCUSS INTERIM SHERIFF CANDIDATES

On Thursday, Jan. 23, the LA County Board of Supervisors has scheduled a special private session to consider interim Sheriff contenders to replace Lee Baca when he retires at the end of January. (Backstory here, if you missed it.) A decision is expected very soon. We’ll keep you posted.