Jerry Brown announces plan to eliminate 400 positions at CDCR HQ. Says it will save GF $30 million.

Image via Wikipedia

Gov. Jerry Brown said today that he is eliminating more than 400 positions at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation headquarters, cuts he first suggested two weeks ago.

Brown’s office said the measure will reduce general fund spending by $30 million. Brown’s revised budget plan, released May 16, included the elimination of 5,500 positions statewide.

“This is a long overdue action to make CDCR more efficient while cutting costs,” Brown said in a prepared statement.

The measure will eliminate 32 executive-level jobs at Corrections and more than 100 management and supervisory positions, Brown’s office said. More than 1,000 headquarters positions, or about 25 percent, have been eliminated in the last 18 months, the office said.

Read more: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/05/#ixzz1NyY532YM

If prison costs rob education, what then?

By Tom Reifer

midnight, May 29, 2011

The dramatic drop in crime rates in San Diego County – with the exception of hate crimes and bank robberies – mirrored to varying extents around the country, cries out for explanation. It defies the premise that economic crisis usually leads to increased crime.

Here, though, citizens must be cautious. Consider an election debate last year between the top contenders for California attorney general. Los Angeles County District Attorney Tom Cooley, who was to lose to his counterpart from San Francisco, Kamala Harris, asserted that historically low crime rates in California were due primarily to increased mass incarceration.

Cooley’s assertion may not be correct.

California’s prisons are certainly operating at nearly double their designed capacity, leading to federal court orders to cut the population by 33,000 prisoners, orders affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court last week. The forced reduction is a controversial move, since California has the highest recidivism rate in the United States, with two-thirds of prisoners returning within three years of release. To comply with the orders, money is being diverted from prisoner rehabilitation, social services and education, all associated with successful prisoner reintegration.

California’s mass incarceration boom, the nation’s largest, saw prisoners increase from 25,000 in 1980 to some 143,000 today. It was supported by the prison guards union, the most powerful lobby in the state, and set the pace for prison expansion in the nation as a whole. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States now has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, some 2.4 million persons. California built 21 new prisons from 1985-2005, or one a year. And in 2009, the United States saw its incarceration rate increase for the 37th year in a row.

Despite trends in recent decades to mass imprisonment or to the broken windows/zero tolerance policing, where police vigorously crack down on petty crimes and misdemeanors, empirical evidence for these theses is shaky to nonexistent. Thorough research on earlier crime declines attributed only a limited role to prison expansion, a quarter at most. Even that is questionable given that Canada experienced a similar drop but without a prison boom. Even those who saw some linkage in the 1990s drop in crime with incarceration see no evidence pointing to a relationship this time around.

In 1993-2001, for example, San Diego was second only to New York in experiencing the biggest crime drop of any city in the United States, with our violent crime decreasing by 45 percent and homicides decreasing by 62 percent. But New York’s crime drop was associated with aggressive zero tolerance policing and a concomitant 50 percent increase in misdemeanor arrests. San Diego’s crime drop, by contrast, was accomplished through a community policing model that resulted in a 1 percent decrease in misdemeanor arrests. In fact, from 1994 to 2000, prison sentences in San Diego were actually reduced by 25 percent.

Continue Reading @ Sign On San Diego

Michigan Lawmaker Wants Inmates to Pay Sales Tax

http://afsc.org/video/michigan-lawmaker-wants-inmates-pay-sales-tax

AFSC’s Peter Martel debates Michigan State Representative, Anthony Forlini on whether or not inmates should pay sales tax.

 

Can A Test Really Tell Who’s A Psychopath?

by Alix Spiegel

Lianne Milton for NPR

a school portrait of Robert Dixon Jr., on the mantle of his father’s home in Stockton, Calif. Though friends and family swear he is a reformed man, Dixon is unlikely to win parole because a test has determined he is a psychopath.

In November 2009, Robert Dixon took a test to determine whether he was a psychopath.

After 26 years in prison, he was due for a parole hearing. In California, before a “lifer” like Dixon appears before the parole board, a state psychologist must first evaluate whether he poses a risk of further violence if released. To do that, the psychologist administers a test — the PCL-R, or Psychopathy Checklist-Revised — designed to measure whether that inmate is a psychopath.

This test has incredible power in the American criminal justice system. It’s used to make decisions such as what kind of sentence a criminal gets and whether an inmate is released on parole. It has even been used to help decide whether someone should be put to death.

Many psychologists believe that psychopaths are so devoid of normal human emotion, so cold and remorseless and impulsive, that they are bound, almost by their very nature, to do harm and violence.

Lianne Milton for NPR

Robert Dixon Sr. holds a photograph of his son, Robert Dixon Jr. (far right), his son’s mentor Bob Stuart, and himself (far left).

And so Dixon found himself sitting across a table from a no-nonsense female psychologist, answering a series of questions about his family and troubled youth.

The woman, Dixon says, didn’t look at him. Instead, she stared at the computer, methodically entering his answers, her face dimly lit by the screen.

They talked for over an hour. Then the psychologist thanked him, closed her computer and went away.

Several months later, the results came back.

“Mr. Dixon obtained a total score on the PCL-R which placed him in the high range of the clinical construct of psychopathy,” the psychologist wrote.

Basically, she’d concluded that Dixon was a psychopath — the first time he’d ever received such a diagnosis. It was suddenly extremely unlikely that Dixon would be paroled.

A Robbery Gone Wrong

The story of Dixon’s incarceration begins 28 years ago, in the winter of 1983, when Dixon and his friend John Walker decided to rob a young man they saw walking down the street in their Oakland, Calif., neighborhood.

Dixon was the lookout. He positioned himself at a distance while Walker approached the man, pulled out a gun and asked for his belongings. The crime was supposed to be quick — grab the wallet and go — but something went wrong.

Dixon remembers hearing Walker’s gun fire, then turning to find their robbery victim lying dead on the ground.

“What I saw when I looked at my co-defendant was shock — he was in shock that he had just pulled that trigger,” Dixon says. “And so I said, you know, ‘What happened!’ “

“He looked at me and he didn’t answer me. He just ran.”

For the crime of being an accessory to murder, Dixon got 15 years to life with the possibility of parole.

A Long Criminal History

This wasn’t Dixon’s first crime.

As a teen he was convicted of date-raping one woman and beating another. Since childhood, in fact, Dixon’s life had been deeply disturbed: He tried to commit suicide at 10, and at 12 he threatened to kill himself and his father, who, according to records, often beat him. He was in and out of detention for the rest of his teens — until the robbery put him in prison.

Lianne Milton for NPR

Robert Dixon Sr., outside his home in Stockton, Calif., on May 14. His son, Robert Dixon Jr., was denied parole after a psychological evaluation deemed him a psychopath.

But friends and family say that since his incarceration, they’ve seen a radical change in Dixon. They all believe deeply that the man they know is transformed and no longer a threat to anyone.

One of those true believers is Dixon’s father, Robert Dixon Sr. “I’ve seen him change in the last 10 years — drastic change in him, especially with me,” Dixon Sr. says. “He got older and he kind of slowed down.”

“Age change everybody,” he adds. “I mean, it’s a poor wind that don’t change.”

Continue Reading @ NPR

Men’s County Jail Visitor Viciously Beaten by Guards

Sheriff Lee Baca says jail is unsupervisable and should be shut down

By Chris Vogel

Carrillo several days after being beaten

Shackled in handcuffs, Gabriel Carrillo was being detained in a small break room near the visitors’ lobby in Men’s Central Jail when, he says, a Sheriff’s deputy knocked him to the floor with an uppercut.

Carrillo, 5 feet 6 and 160 pounds, doubled over in pain. Three deputies began kicking and punching the baby-faced 23-year-old in his head and thigh, tearing his white T-shirt while blood splattered on his blue jeans and Air Jordans.

With each blow, Carrillo felt his body jerk as his head bounced up and down on the cold, county building floor. He briefly lost consciousness, only to wake to the sting of punches to his head and face.

Through eyes purple with bruises and nearly swollen shut, Carrillo could see blood pouring out of his head onto the floor.

“I’m not fucking resisting,” he cried out.

Suddenly, Carrillo felt a blast of chemical spray. He was blinded and gasping for air as more punches pummeled his increasingly numb legs and torso. It was like being caught in a violent ocean wave, Carrillo recalls. Every time he tried to come up for air, another blow drove him back under.

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Carrillo wheezed.

“Shut the fuck up,” Carrillo claims a deputy said. “If you can talk, you can breathe.”

Finally, Carrillo lay motionless, watching officers wipe his blood off the floor with clean towels, thinking to himself, “How did this happen? All I was trying to do was visit my brother in jail.

PHOTO BY TED SOQUI

The Men’s Central Jail

Continue Reading @ LA Weekly

To Reduce Prison Population, Stop Denying Employment

Posted on 25 May 2011

By Margaret Dooley-Sammuli and Michelle Natividad Rodriguez

The US Supreme Court this week upheld a 3-judge federal court order requiring California to significantly reduce its prison population in two years. California will not have to let any inmates out early to achieve this reduction – but it will need to slow the rate of putting people back in. About 60 percent of people (the highest rate in the nation) will be returned to prison in California within three years of their release. The state’s shamefully high re-incarceration rate is driven by many factors, but perhaps the most pernicious are practices that all but ban employment of formerly incarcerated people. Denying jobs to people with a conviction history punishes us all.

Criminal background checks for employment are inescapable in most industries today. Although many employers have legitimate reasons for employee screening, in a recent report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a survey of online job postings on Craigslist revealed that both large and small employers are engaging in the systematic, unlawful rejection of people with convictions or arrests.

An estimated 65 million Americans – or more than one in four adults – have been arrested or convicted at some point in their lives and face barriers to employment as a result. Often these workers are being turned away for jobs for records that are completely unrelated to the performance of job duties. A huge portion of records involve drug law violations. Over 1.6 million people were arrested for a drug law violation in 2009 alone, 1.4 million of them for a possession offense and about half for marijuana. Even when a worker can show rehabilitation, too often employers are rejecting people with any mark on their criminal records.

Not only is this practice of using criminal records as an absolute bar to employment unfair, it is illegal. Fortunately, there are legal remedies for this type of discrimination and in 2010 courts saw a significant increase in cases challenging employment practices that systematically exclude people from jobs with a conviction or arrest.

Given the breadth of the discrimination and vastness of the population of people with criminal records, a multitude of strategies to improve the employment prospects of people with a criminal record must be implemented. In additional to litigation, sentencing reform that reduces the criminal penalties at the front end may be another viable and popular approach.

According to a new Lake Research poll surveying 800 California general election voters, a whopping 72% support reducing the penalty for possession of a small amount of illegal drugs for personal use from a felony to a misdemeanor, including a solid majority who support this reform strongly. Given the higher stigmatization of people with felonies as compared to misdemeanors, this reform could have a significant impact on reducing job barriers for people with criminal records.

The March survey, which was commissioned by the Drug Policy Alliance, the ACLU of Northern California and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, found that support for reducing drug possession penalties crosses all the partisan, regional, and demographic lines that normally divide California voters. Solid majorities of Democrats (79%), Independents (72%), and Republicans (66%) from every corner of the state overwhelmingly agree that it’s time for a new approach. The consensus is so broad and so strong, that politicians stand in the way of this sentencing reform at their own risk. A 41% plurality of those surveyed say they’d be more likely to support a candidate who reduced the penalty to a misdemeanor, compared to just 15% who say they’d be less likely. Poll results and analysis are available online.

Some of this support comes from an interest in reducing waste in the prison system. But according to the survey, Californians aren’t just interested in saving money. California voters understand that a life-long felony record for drug possession makes it tough to find a job or support a family. Instead of a lifetime of punishment, voters want people to be engaged in society by contributing to their communities and thereby increasing the well-being and public safety for all Californians.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli is deputy state director in Southern California with the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s leading organization working to end the war on drugs. Michelle Natividad Rodriguez is staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and co-author of the recently published 65 Million “Need Not Apply”: The Case for Reforming Criminal Background Checks for Employment.

Published on California Progress Report (http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site)

The Toughest Beat …

Don’t Fear the City: Urban America’s Crime Drops to Lowest in 40 Years

…and yet, incarceration continues to grow……

A new FBI report reveals that big cities are the safest they’ve been in decades

Reuters/Richard Carson

The long-held image of violent, crime-filled cities permeates popular culture. Thanks to TV shows, rap music, and a deep-seated antipathy to cities that has been apparent in some political and cultural quarters since at least the nineteenth century, countless Americans continue to perceive big cities through the lens of 40-year-old movies like Taxi Driver and The Out of Towners– as cauldrons of crime, filth, and corruption (and magnets for immigrants, gays, Jews, intellectuals, and other “disreputable” minorities).

Violent crimes, which include murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, fell 5.1 percent in cities with more than 1 million people.

The past couple of decades have seen a powerful back-to-the-city movement that has transformed many once-notorious districts into residential quarters and high-end shopping districts. Times Square, a byword for crime and urban decay, has become a Disney-like tourist magnet, and parts of Herald Square, the heart of NYC’s feared Tenderloin district a century ago, have been closed to traffic and filled with tables and chairs. Clearly something must be happening with urban crime.

Crime — both property crime and violent crime — is down to its lowest level in 40 years, especially in America’s biggest cities, according to newly released data from the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report. The data was collected from January through December 2010 and breaks out metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas as well as cities of various sizes. For the fourth year in a row, there has been yet another substantial decline in crime: 5.5 percent fewer murders, forcible rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults were reported in 2010 than in 2009; property crimes fell by 2.8 percent over the same period and reported arsons dropped by 8.3 percent. “In all regions, the country appears to be safer,” reports the New York Times. “The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s, when violent crime peaked in the United States.”

The drop was seen as particularly striking, confounding criminologists, whose studies find that crime rates typically rise alongside rising unemployment and worsening economic conditions. My former Carnegie Mellon University colleague, Alfred Blumstein, the world’s leading demographer of crime told the Times the trend was “striking” because “it came at a time when everyone anticipated it could be going up because of the recession.”

But the biggest and most surprising drop came in the nation’s biggest cities, especially those with more than 1 million people.

Continue Reading @ The Atlantic

California prison officials hold 1st ‘medical parole’ hearing for convicted rapist

Nick Roman | KPCC

California takes a small step toward reducing its inmate population and prison costs today. Prison officials will consider whether to grant “medical parole” to a paralyzed inmate.

Steven Charles Martinez is serving a life sentence at Corcoran State Prison for an especially brutal rape and kidnap 13 years ago. After he was convicted and sentenced, Martinez ended up at Centinela State Prison in Imperial County.

Ten years ago, a pair of inmates attacked him and stabbed him in the neck – severing his spinal cord. Ever since, Martinez has been a quadriplegic – but he’s been under guard the whole time. At 42, Martinez could live another 20 years or more – which means paying for guards for another 20 years, too.

Continue Reading @ KPCC

Who should CA release to reduce prison crowding? Tell KPCC public radio.

How should California cut the prison population?

Hello from Sharon McNary in the KPCC newsroom. I’m writing to you and others in our Insight Network of news sources who have told us they have lived, worked or had family members in the California prison system. I’ve got some news for you today and a request to help inform our coverage of prison crowding.

First, the news: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that California must cut its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates over the next two years. What does this mean to you?

For background, here is today’s news story and a link to the Supreme Court decision. KPCC state reporter Julie Small explained the decision on The Madeleine Brand Show this morning. And Larry Mantle spoke with Don Specter of the Prison Law Office and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and others about the decision on today’s AirTalk.

Now it’s time to hear from you. Click here to tell KPCC how this decision should be put into effect and how it matters to you.

Your response is confidential and seen only by journalists. Nothing you share is aired or published without your permission, however, I read and respond to what you tell us and share it with our reporter. It helps inform our coverage of important issues like prison conditions and medical care.

Thanks again for your continued participation in the Public Insight Network, and I look forward to hearing your stories.

Sincerely,

Sharon McNary
Public Insight Journalism at KPCC
smcnary@kpcc.org
See other questions: www.kpcc.org/network

What is the Public Insight Network?
The Public Insight Network is you and thousands of others like you who have agreed to share what they know to help public radio cover the news, find stories, and add depth to our reporting.

As part of the Public Insight Network, you have an open line into our newsrooms and programs. We’ll send you about an e-mail a month asking for your knowledge on issues and stories we are pursuing.

http://www.scpr.org/network/questions/prisoncrowding/