The Pew Recidivism Report: How CA Can Cut $233 Million

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:

In prison, Oregon inmates receive risk and needs assessments at intake, and targeted case management during incarceration, along with detailed transition planning that begins six months before release. In the community, probation officers use a sanctioning grid to impose swift, certain consequences for violations, creating consistency across offenders
and from county to county. In both settings, offender programs are anchored in research and continually monitored and updated to optimize their effectiveness.

The change in the handling of offenders who violate terms of their supervision was striking. In the past, parole and probation violators filled more than a quarter of Oregon’s prison beds. Today violators are rarely reincarcerated. Instead, they face an array of graduated sanctions in the community, including a short jail stay as needed to hold violators accountable. Results of the Pew/ASCA survey confirmed this— only 5.9 percent of offenders released in 1999 and 3.3 percent of the 2004 cohort were returned to prison on technical violations.

“It’s pretty rare in Oregon for someone to be violated all the way back to prison,” said Oregon Director of Corrections Max Williams, “so we don’t have that revolving door that puts so much pressure on the prison
population in other states.”

A key piece of legislation, passed with bipartisan support in 2003, helped fuel Oregon’s efforts. The bill, SB 267, required that any correctional program receiving state money be evidence-based in its design and delivery.

“I think the bill pushed Oregon forward at a faster pace, and forced us to make sure our programs were truly translating the best available research into practice in the field,” Williams said.

There’s much more to the report, so I urge you to read it all.

It’s time to end business as usual
in our prison system and for
legislators to think and act with courage
and creativity. We can make sensible and
proven reforms to our criminal justice
system that will cut prison costs while
keeping the public safe.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R)
January 8, 2011