For Real Prison Reform, Longer is Not Always Better

By Lizzie Buchen

Last week, while defiantly declaring the end of California’s prison crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown insisted further reductions in prison overcrowding “cannot be achieved without the early release of inmates serving time for serious or violent felonies,” a move that would “jeopardize public safety.” In other words, now that Realignment is sending low-level offenders to local custody instead of state prison, those who remain in prison need to stay there to protect the public.

This unfounded assumption is used to justify a large and growing mass of the state’s unnecessary incarceration. Most serious and violent offenders do need to serve some time behind bars to protect the public, but we keep them there for far too long. And the terms are only getting longer. If California wants a sustainable solution to its prison crisis, it needs to rethink its increasingly harsh sentencing policies across the gamut of offenses – not just the low-level targets of Realignment and Prop 36.

A recent study found that California offenders who committed violent crimes can now expect to serve seven years in prison – in 1990, they would have served less than three. Looking at people who committed murder, those who were released in 2009 served an average of 16 years; now, they can expect to serve more than 50 years. This lengthening of sentences for violent crimes is a major reason California’s prisons are overflowing and will continue to do so. In 2009, nearly 100,000 of the state’s prison inmates were doing time for violent crimes, a number that will only grow as the exit door continues to recede.

Continue Reading @ California Progress Report

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Almost Half Of Federal Prisoners Held For Drug Crimes

By Nicole Flatow

Although the overall U.S. prison population declined slightly in 2011, the federal prison population continued to rise, with rates of drug and immigration offenders that eclipse those held for violent crimes. While only 8 percent of federal prisoners were sentenced for violent crimes in 2011, almost half of federal inmates – 48 percent – were in prison for drug crimes, according to Department of Justice statistics. Another 11 percent were held for immigration offenses – one of the largest-growing segments of the prison population.

These numbers reflect the impact of the aggressive U.S. “War on Drugs,” a major contributor to the United States’ standing as the number one jailer in the world. Overall declines in U.S. prisons of 0.9 percent are attributable to state prisons, as some states have been moved by budget crises to adopt innovative reforms, and some jurisdictions have moved toward decriminalizing minor drug offenses.

But federal drug law remains draconian, with harsh mandatory minimum sentences for sometimes minor nonviolent roles in drug deals.

Continue Reading @ Think Progress

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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

Va. OKs bill to let violent crime victims meet with death row inmates

Lorraine Whoberry tried for years to meet face-to-face with her daughter’s killer before he was executed last month. She was repeatedly denied.

So the day after she witnessed his execution, Whoberry sat down with Gov. Bob McDonnell and asked for his help. A bill was making its way through the Virginia General Assembly that would allow victims of violent crime to meet with the perpetrators, but it excluded those on death row and juveniles.

McDonnell amended the bill to allow victims to meet with inmates on death row. On Wednesday, the General Assembly unanimously approved the change.

Although more than half of the states have victim-offender mediation programs, advocates said Virginia would be one of the first to cement it in state law. Virginia also becomes one of only a handful that allow meetings with death row inmates.

“Even though it’s not going to affect us, at least we’ve got something done,” Whoberry said when told about the change.

Even in states that offer victim-offender meetings, “there are a thousand bureaucratic road blocks put in the way,” said Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship, a national prison ministry.

“The system has a paternalistic view that they know better than the victim, they’re trying to protect the victim,” he said. “In most cases, the victims have great difficulty getting in to see the offenders.”

Virginia’s Department of Corrections routinely refuses to allow victims to meet with their attackers. A department spokesman refused to comment on the legislation, saying only that the agency supported the governor.

Currently, victims must request a meeting in writing, and requests are approved or rejected based on the type of crime committed, the inmate’s behavior and security level, mental health issues and the reason for the visit. On average, the department receives 10 to 15 such requests a year, and half are approved.

But meetings with condemned inmates are forbidden.

That came as a shock to Whoberry when she was denied after her daughter’s killer, Paul Warner Powell, agreed to meet with her. Powell attempted to rape her 16-year-old daughter, Stacie Reed, and then stabbed her when she fought him off in 1999. He waited for her 14-year-old sister to come home and then raped and stabbed her, but she lived.

“I was under the impression I had rights,” she said. “But I keep finding out I don’t. The offender has more rights than we do.”

Powell’s attorney, Jonathan Sheldon, tried to arrange a meeting, but also was denied. In the end — a day before Powell died by electrocution March 18 — Sheldon arranged to have Whoberry and her family come to his office and talk to Powell for more than two hours over the phone.

For Whoberry, “it brought that monster into being a human being,” she said.

They talked about his newfound faith, his life in prison and how he dealt with what he had done. The family asked questions, and Whoberry said she left with a feeling of peace that had avoided her in the 11 years since her daughter Stacie’s murder.

“As a victim and survivor there’s things you want to say to them that only you can say to them, and they need to hear it,” Whoberry said. “They need to hear it from you.” The more serious or violent the crime, the more the victims benefit from meeting with the offender, Nolan said. Often, criminals take plea bargains. Even if they go to trial, victims often never really get their questions answered.

Supporters, including McDonnell, said the meetings could be restorative and therapeutic for both the victim and the offender.

“I think in those rare handful of cases where both agree, I think we ought to let them do it and I think it could be a good outcome,” McDonnell said.

Whoberry said the meetings are not for everyone, but that it should be an option if both the victim and the offender agree.

“I continue to be Stacie’s voice,” Whoberry said. “And this time Stacie was heard.”

– Associated Press