Parole and Race in California Prisons

It’s Criminal Justice Friday….with two stories where there are no perfect, slam-dunk answers to the problems they portray.

1. THE POLITICS OF PAROLE

Yesterday in a split decision, the California Supreme Court handed down a ruling that will make it easier for an eligible inmate to get parole over the objection of the Governor. The LA Times has the full story.

He’s the relevant part of the decision.

In sum, the Board or the Governor may base a denial-of-parole decision upon the circumstances of the offense, or upon other immutable facts such as an inmate’s criminal history, but some evidence will support such reliance only if those facts support the ultimate conclusion that an inmate continues to pose an unreasonable risk to public safety. (Regs., § 2281, subd. (a).) Accordingly, the relevant inquiry for a reviewing court is not merely whether an inmate’s crime was especially callous, or shockingly vicious or lethal, but whether the identified facts are probative to the central issue of current dangerousness when considered in light of the full record before the Board or the Governor.

At one time in California, if a man or women received a sentence of 25 to life, this meant after a quarter century in prison (or very often 85 percent of the quarter century), if a parole board deemed them to be “rehabilitated” and no longer a threat to public safety, they could be paroled.

But rehabilitation is an inexact science, and all it takes is one Willy Horton or equivelent to fuel a lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key fever that, in California, usually results in some initiative or other.

So it was that in the midst of the law-and-order trend of the late 1980’s, the issue of parole became politicized when California voters gave the governor the power to review the parole board’s decisions if inmates had been convicted of first-degree or second-degree murder. Unlike the parole board who had only the facts of the parolee’s case to consider, the governor was subject to a host of political winds and inflences.

The number of paroles handed out took a huge dive. Plus, when it came to appointing parole boards members there was a strong trend toward chosing only those with the most conservative of outlooks on the matter.

It came to be that with a sentence of, say, fifteen-to-life , it almost never meant fifteen, it really meant life—even for many non-violent crimes. And juveniles.

This was particularly true when Gray Davis was governor. Davis handled any pressure he may have felt around the parole question by denying parole recommendations altogether. If you had an L after your sentence, you very rarely got out no matter what the parole board recommended. In his entire time in office Davis paroled 8 people convicted of first or second degree murder. Famously, he refused to consider badly abused women who killed relentlessly battering spouses—even after they had served decades in prison.

Hard-core law-and-order Governor, Pete Wilson, was marginally more reasonable than Davis, and paroled 98 murder-convicted lifers.

At the same time that paroles granted were fewer, due to laws like 3-strkes and 10-20-Life, the number of people serving life sentences jumped from 8,153 in 1990 to 27,375 in 2004. In the years since, the number has gone still higher.

From the beginning of his time in Sacramento, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been far more open than either of his predecessors to paroling people whom he believes have transformed themselves and no longer pose a threat. Yet, he too is subject to political presures. As the San Jose Mercury News puts it:

“…some crime victims organizations complain that Schwarzenegger is too lenient when it comes to granting parole to convicted killers. The California Crime Victims Action Alliance states on its Web site that since Schwarzenegger took office in November 2003 he has allowed the parole of 270 prisoners with life sentences out of the 890 approved by the board in that time.

I could be dead wrong, but it occurs to me that the California Supremes decision might possibly be helpful to Schwarzenegger by giving him political cover and thereby letting him make his parole decisions based more on the facts of each case rather than political pressures.

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AMERICA’S TOUGHEST PLACE TO DESEGREGATE

For decades California’s prisons have been divided up according to race in order prevent violence and riots. Then the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was unconstitutional. In response to the ruling, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is getting ready to integrate the state’s prisons.

My pal, KPCC’s Frank Stolz has an excellent overview report on NPR that looks at complexity of the prison desegregation issue.

NOTE: Although the state has no choice but to comply I do not have an over amount of confidence that this will turn out well—(and neither do the guys who call me collect from correctional institutions).

If you listen to the recording (as I hope you will), when you get to Connie Rice’s comments, you’ll have my worries precisely.

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photo by Rich Pedroncelli