To Cut Costs, States Relax Prison Policies

The Deerfield Correctional Facility in Ionia, Mich., was closing, so inmates were put on a bus to be transported to another prison, in Muskegon.













Corrections officers at Deerfield carrying chains for the final 33 of 1,200 prisoners being transferred to another prison.













Begs the question: if financial difficulties change prison policies, are such policies valid in the first place?



March 25, 2009
To Cut Costs, States Relax Prison Policies
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

CARSON CITY, Nev. — For nearly three decades, most states have dealt with lawbreakers in two ways: lock more of them up for longer periods, and build more prisons to hold them. Now many governments, out of money and buried under mounting prison costs, are reversing those policies and practices.

Some states, like Colorado and Kansas, are closing prisons. Others, like New Jersey, have replaced jail time with community programs or other sanctions for people who violate parole. Kentucky lawmakers passed a bill this month that enhances the credits some inmates can earn toward release.

Michigan is doing a little of all of this, in addition to freeing some offenders who have yet to serve their maximum sentence. And last Wednesday, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, signed legislation to repeal the state’s death penalty, which aside from ethical concerns was seen as costly.

Being tough on crime and sentencing has long been the clear path toward job retention for state lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats alike. But the economic crisis is forcing them to take a more pragmatic approach as prisoners are increasingly seen less as indistinct wrongdoers and more as expenses that must be reined in.

“When state budgets are flush,” said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, “prisons are something that governors and legislators all support, and they don’t want to touch sentencing reform. But when dollars are as tight as they are now, you have to make really tough choices. And so now things are in play.”

Recessions tend to prompt changes to corrections policies. After the recession at the start of this decade, numerous states enacted laws eliminating some long mandatory minimum sentences; several began to offer early release and treatment options to some drug offenders. Those changes, though, were far less reaching than what is happening now and did little to curb exploding corrections budgets.

In the past 20 years, correction department budgets have quadrupled and are outpacing every major spending area outside health care, according to a recent report by the Pew Center on the States. With 7.3 million Americans in prison, on parole or under probation, states spent $47 billion in 2008, the study said.

Faced with such costs, even states known for being particularly tough on crime are revisiting their policies and laws.

“In Kentucky, our prison budget is approaching half a billion dollars,” said J. Michael Brown, secretary of the State Justice and Public Safety Cabinet. “And as dollars get scarce, it forces a tremendous amount of scrutiny.”

The annual cost to keep someone in prison varies by state, and the type of institution, but the typical cost cited by states is about $35,000, said Peggy Burke of the Center for Effective Public Policy, a nonprofit group that works with local governments on criminal justice matters.

The most pervasive cost-saving trend among corrections departments has been to look closely at parole systems, in which it is no longer cost-effective to monitor released inmates, largely because too many violate their terms, often on technicalities, and end up back in prison. In California, among the few states to mandate parole for all convicts, parole violators — not new offenders — account for the largest percentage of inmates entering the system.

New Jersey recently began a program for some offenders on parole with technical violations, like failing to report to a parole officer or changing their address without the officer’s approval. Rather than being returned to jail, those former inmates are sent to a center for a clinical assessment of their risks and needs. With that change, the state is on track to save $16.2 million this fiscal year.

Other states are shortening paroles, or even sentences, to save money.

In Kentucky, Gov. Steven L. Beshear, a Democrat, is about to sign a bill that makes permanent a pilot program that offers qualifying inmates credit for time served on parole against sentence dates, in part to avoid a pattern of inmates’ choosing to stay in prison rather than risking later parole violations. The trial program saved the state $12 million last year. The state has also adopted a program that gives treatment rather than jail time to select drug offenders.

In California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has called for $400 million to be cut from the state’s corrections budget, officials are seeking to remove low-level drug offenders from the parole supervision system and to provide them treatment options instead.

Like other states making such changes, California is led by a governor who long opposed such shifts in prison policies. But Mr. Schwarzenegger, as well as other leaders and lawmakers who are far more conservative, has come around to a view held by advocates of sentencing and prison reform that longer sentences do little to reduce recidivism among certain nonviolent criminals.

“In California we are out of room and we’re out of money,” said the state’s corrections secretary, Matthew Cate. “It may be time to take some of these steps that we should have taken long ago.”

Several states are also looking at sentencing itself. In New York, for example, Gov. David A. Paterson, a Democrat, has proposed an overhaul of the so-called Rockefeller drug laws that impose lengthy mandatory sentences on many nonviolent drug offenders.

Some states are simply consolidating operations and closing prisons, which is controversial among lawmakers and often riles a community. Colorado, Kansas, Michigan and New Jersey have all shut down or announced the closing of at least one prison. Others are proposing to do so.

Here in Carson City, home to one of the oldest state prisons in the country, the state estimates it would save $18 million a year by closing the prison. But the idea has rattled employees, some of whom have followed their parents’ career paths, and the community, which considers the prison a provider of jobs and an important piece of Nevada history.

“We are the oldest prison west of the Mississippi,” the warden, Greg Smith, said during a tour last week. “And the staff here takes a lot of pride in that.”

The 220-year-old prison is older than the state of Nevada, and the buildings, according to officials, sit on land filled with saber-toothed tiger prints. It first housed men who gave “firewater” to Indians and is where the state’s license plates are made. But the prison’s aging facilities have raised questions about its efficiency compared with modern counterparts.

The lament is similar in Michigan, where three prisons are set to be closed and more are being studied.

“As the economy has worsened, prisons are the modern-day factory in our rural areas,” said Russ Marlan, a spokesman for the Michigan Corrections Department. “We built these prisons in the 1980s, and people were adamantly opposed to having them in their communities. Now we go and try to take them out, and they don’t want them gone.”

Meanwhile, some states that revised parole and sentencing in boom times are fighting a different battle: to hold on to the financing that made those changes possible.

In Kansas, for instance, where drug treatment has replaced incarceration for some offenders and mentally ill offenders have received housing assistance, the prison population fell in recent years, largely because recidivism also declined, said Roger Werholtz, secretary of the Kansas Corrections Department. Now many of those programs have fallen victim to budget cuts.

You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish

This is one of the best books I have ever read.

U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan

This war won't be won by 2013, will it, Senator McCain?

The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

It'll make Afghanistan an American colony, won't it? That'll be great for peace and prosperity, surely.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

630 plus 270 makes precisely 1,000 prisoners, acknowledged.

Bagram is“just not suitable,” another Pentagon official said. “At some point, you have to say, ‘That’s it. This place was not made to keep people there indefinitely.’ ”

Indefinitely. That is a very long time.

Although a special Afghan court has been established to prosecute detainees formerly held at Bagram and Guantánamo, American officials have been hesitant to turn over those prisoners they consider most dangerous.

Hesitant to turn over? Makes Afghans look untrustworthy, or incompetent.

After years of entreaties by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United States recently began to allow relatives to speak with prisoners at Bagram through video hookups.

Years. Bush and company are contemptible.

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers. Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said. As of April, about 10 juveniles were being held at Bagram, according to a recent American report to a United Nations committee.

What a legacy to leave.

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’

A sorry record. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Compared to any other nation, the US has many more people behind bars. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison.
(That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

2,258,983 in the US; 885,014 in Russia; 1,565,771 in China. Wow. 113 prisoners in Iceland, or 36 per 100,000 people -- the US has 751 prisoners per 100,00 people. A chart with the NYT article shows the ugly truth. Yes, China has many more than 1.6 million prisoners, but it, nominally, a disctatorship, while the US, nominally, is a democracy.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

One in one hundred!

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

Get this one: Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

The US a rogue state. My, my.

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s.

Interesting time.
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people, or something along that line, was a slogan in use by people opposed to gun bans, or control. Relatively high rate? That needs explaining. Here is some explanation.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

A twist.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

Uniquely American: People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

And: Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

A critic is spot-on: Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.

Spot on. Still, there is no simple answer.

... it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.


Even experts can be wrong, I'd say.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

That would seem to confirm race as a factor.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates. “Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”

Nothing is simple.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading. “Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Oscar winner plans Abu Ghraib photo site

The dark side of US conduct in Iraq. The name Abu Ghraib created a scnadal when the story first appeared, but it has receded with time.

Using the current promotional site for his new movie to spark the larger project he envisions, Errol Morris plans to create an interface in which clicking on each photo pulls up its context and circumstances.

Photo: AP

It should not be forgotten.

Executives Teach Inmates How to Be Employees

This is a fascinating story. It is impressive how a businessman dedicated himself to doing for others, to helping those less fortunate than him, and has made a big difference. Imagine a corporate executive dedicating himself to helping people in prison. Well, imagine anyone doing it. It being a businessman, to my mind, gives lie to ideological statements such as that business people don't have a heart, are cold, calculating, bottom-line-focused automatons.

"Mark Goldsmith didn't expect to go to jail when he volunteered to be "principal for a day" at a New York City school. But after requesting a "tough school," he was assigned to Horizon Academy, a high school for inmates ages 18 to 24 at Rikers Island prison."

How many liberals would have done this? About as many conservatives, I'd say.

"Mr. Goldsmith, a former executive at Revlon and Shiseido, was ushered through locked gates to the prison's classrooms. Standing in front of his new class, he looked at the young students and saw in them signs of his own difficult youth."

Nothing has an impact as identifying with your audience. Mr. Goldsmith wanted to do more than he thought he could accomplish one day a year, so he started his own organization to help inmates: Getting Out and Staying Out (GOSO).

"Mr. Goldsmith and 14 other current or retired executives who volunteer at GOSO, based in Harlem, plus a paid staff of six, are working to counter the familiar story of prisoners getting released without skills, jobs, money or a place to live, and then resorting to crime only to get locked up again."

""A lot of programs for prisoners are run by former prisoners or social workers, but Mark brings a business perspective, he's a role model of success and he tells kids who have never thought they can be successful that they're entitled to that," says Anthony Tassi, executive director of adult education in the mayor's office, New York."

Nothing quite like pragmatism. And dedication.

"Mr. Goldsmith and Richard Block, the retired CEO of a 2,000-employee entertainment- packaging company, spend several days a week at Rikers, counseling inmates studying for their high-school equivalency diplomas."

Several days a week is commitment.

Mr. Block wants inmates to know there are hundreds of different jobs and they don't have to choose between crime and menial labor.

And the apotheosis:

"If they'd get to know some of these kids better, they'd know they're not hopeless, he says. "A lot of them are as smart and talented as anyone you meet in business, they just haven't had anyone to help them."