Is California so dysfunctional that doom and gloom is the right reaction to Plata?

May 26, 2011

Regular readers likely realize that I see much of the doom and gloom coming from the Plata dissenters and from some commentators to be overheated reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision to affirm the prisoner release order requiring California to significantly reduce its prison population. Experiences in Texas and New York and a number of other states show that astute sentencing and correction reforms can allow a significant reduction in a state’s prison population without a severe adverse impact on public safety. Thus, I do not believe a huge Golden State crime spike is a necessary (or even likely) consequence of the Plata ruling if California responds reasonably and effectively to the population reduction order.

That said, two new pieces appearing in today’s Los Angeles Times has me fearing that California’s politics and practices may be so dysfunctional that perhaps the state will fail to be able to respond reasonably and effectively to the Plata population reduction order. For starters, consider this piece headlined “No easy fix for California’s prison crisis; Even if a court order to ease crowding can be met, sentencing laws could fill lockups again, analysts say,” which reports on these on-going realities:

[W]ithout sweeping policy changes, the state will still send high numbers of offenders to prison under “three-strikes” sentencing laws, put about 70% of parolees back behind bars for violations within three years of their release and keep ambitious prison construction plans on hold for lack of money, according to experts and inmates’ advocates….

Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to ease crowding would move inmates convicted of low-level and nonviolent crimes into the custody of county officials. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that as many as 32,500 such inmates could be transferred in time to meet the court’s two-year deadline.

But Brown’s plan requires the state to pay local officials hundreds of millions of dollars to help them cope with the influx, and the money would come from tax increases or extensions that are politically controversial. So far, there’s no guarantee the state will come up with the money or would continue to provide it indefinitely, although Brown wants a constitutional guarantee that Sacramento could not cut funding to the counties….

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and veteran criminal law scholar, points to the high recidivism rate and past cuts in funding for prison rehabilitation and education programs as a formula for continued — even worse — crowding. “We have to stop the insanity of sending nonviolent drug offenders and low-level theft offenders to prison for life,” Levenson said. “Nobody is saying we should let murderers out…. We have to stop the revolving door of parolees being returned for minor violations.”

Compounding the situation is Jessica’s Law, the 2006 initiative barring sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools or parks, making it difficult for California’s 92,000 released sex offenders to comply with that parole condition, especially in large cities.

In 2009, the most recent year for which the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has statistics, almost 85,000 parolees were sent back to prison, most of them for two- and three-month sentences. That forced the state to erect three-tier bunks in sports halls, where parole violators spend their terms in the company of hardened criminals and without access to the minimal educational and rehabilitative programs that the corrections system retains after years of budget cuts.

With the average number of parolees in California at 127,383 on any given day, the state’s overcrowding problem is bound to reemerge unless substantial changes are made to sentencing laws, parole conditions and in-prison rehabilitation programs, Levenson said.

Drug counseling and education have been severely hampered by overcrowding that has spilled into gymnasiums and meeting rooms. “There’s no space and no money” for those programs, said [Michael Bien, whose law firm launched a 1990 case addressing poor mental healthcare in California prisons that ultimately led to Monday’s ruling].

Even more distressing than these chronic challenges facing California are more acute problems such as the one reported in this piece, headlined “Computer errors let violent California prisoners go free; A computer system that lacked key information about inmates factored in the release of an estimated 450 prisoners with a “high risk of violence,” according to the California inspector general.” Here are the worrisome details:

Computer errors prompted California prison officials to mistakenly release an estimated 450 inmates with “a high risk for violence” as unsupervised parolees in a program meant to ease overcrowding, according to the state’s inspector general. More than 1,000 additional prisoners presenting a high risk of committing drug crimes, property crimes and other offenses were also let out, officials said. No attempt was made to return any of the offenders to state lockups or place them on supervised parole, said inspector general spokeswoman Renee Hansen.

All of the prisoners were placed on “non-revocable parole,” whose participants are not required to report to parole officers and can be sent back to prison only if caught committing a crime. The program was started in January 2010 for inmates judged to be at very low risk of reoffending, leaving parole agents free to focus on supervising higher-risk parolees.

The revelations come two days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California’s prisons are dangerously overcrowded and upheld an earlier order that state officials find a way to reduce the 143,335-inmate population by roughly 33,000. The state has two years to comply. State Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), a former prosecutor who requested an investigation of the unsupervised-parole program, said the inspector general’s report “confirms my worst fears” about it.

Investigators reviewed case files for 200 of the 10,134 former inmates who were on non-revocable parole in July of last year. They found that 31 were not eligible, and nine of those were determined likely to commit violent crimes. The inspector general and corrections officials refused to identify the inmates who were released erroneously. They also would not specify what their original offenses had been.

Using the 15% error rate they found in their sample, investigators estimated that more than 450 violent inmates had been released during the first seven months of the program, the time period they reviewed. Prison officials have disputed the findings, saying they had corrected some of the computer problems discovered by the inspector general. The error rate is now 8%, the inspector general report says.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to address overcrowding would shift tens of thousands of low-level offenders from prison to county custody. Counties would also supervise most low-risk parolees, like those in the non-revocable program.

But if the state can’t properly identify which inmates qualify for an unsupervised parole program, Lieu said on Wednesday, “how can the public have confidence they can release 33,000 felons safely?”

Under the law that created non-revocable parole, inmates are excluded if they are gang members, have committed sex crimes or violent felonies or have been determined to pose a high risk to reoffend based on an assessment of their records behind bars. That’s where the problems begin, according to the inspector general. The computer program prison officials used to make that assessment does not access an inmate’s disciplinary history.

Prior posts on the Plata ruling: