A federal judge outlined a plan for California to regain control over its prison health care system after nearly a decade of federal oversight.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson handed down the seven-page order after a court-appointed overseer reported that conditions have improved substantially since Henderson appointed a receiver to run California’s prison health care in 2006.
Henderson’s order is “a well thought-out, elegant transition plan,” said Donald Specter, director of the Prison Law Office and one of the attorneys who sued over poor prison health care.
Each of the state’s 34 prisons must pass an inspection before they can be returned to state control, Henderson said.
The inspections, performed by the inspector general of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, are under way and are expected to take more than a year, The Associated Press reported.
California “has spent $2 billion for new prison medical facilities, doubled its prison health care budget to nearly $1.7 billion and reduced its prison population by more than 40,000 inmates in the last decade,” the AP noted. This was to address the deficiencies in its prison health care system that Henderson found violated inmates’ constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment.
Some prisons lag far behind others and more work still needs to be done system-wide, reported the court-appointed receiver, J. Clark Kelso.
Henderson also noted in his order that “critical areas of improvement remain.”
The judge said prisons that pass the inspections could be returned to state control, but the receiver could retake control if conditions at a prison decline. Eventually, the receiver is expected to take on “more of a monitoring function,” he said.
To regain control, the state must meet constitutional standards for a year, Henderson said.
“I agree with Kelso that there are still significant issues, both systemic and individual institutions, which have to be corrected before the receivership should end,” Specter said.
In the U.S. Firearms Involved Many More Suicides Than Homicides
Most firearm deaths are suicides, not homicides, according to the 2015 Annual Review of Public Health.
Suicides accounted on average for 60.5 percent of firearm deaths over the decade ending in 2012, a university report says.
In the United States, “The mortality rate from firearm violence has remained essentially unchanged since just before the turn of the 21st century,” wrote Professor Garen J. Wintemute of the University of California at Davis’ Violence Prevention Research Program.
Since 2006, firearm homicides have decreased, but firearm suicides have increased by a like amount, he said.
“Alcohol and controlled substance abuse are important predictors of future risk for violence, including firearm violence, whether directed at others or at oneself and whether or not mental illness is also present,” Wintemute wrote.
The review, titled “The Epidemiology of Firearm Violence in the 21st Century United States,” presents the following data:
In 2012, there were 32,288 deaths from firearm violence: 11,622 homicides and 20,666 suicides.
“Firearm violence is among the leading
causes of death for teenagers and young adults”
The societal costs of firearm suicides and homicides were about $164.6 billion in 2010, roughly 1.1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product that year.
During the decade ending in 2012, there were on average 82.3 deaths from firearm violence every day: 32.5 homicides and 49.8 suicides.
Mass public killings accounted for a very small percentage of deaths from firearm violence. The four high-fatality events in this century resulted in 84 homicides.
Firearm ownership is probably the most widespread factor associated with risk of death from firearm violence.
Compared with other industrialized nations, the United States has uniquely high mortality rates from firearm homicide and suicide.
Contrary to popular belief, mental illness by itself is not a leading contributor to interpersonal firearm violence, though depression is a major factor for firearm suicide.
Firearm violence is among the leading causes of death for teenagers and young adults.
Firearm homicides are concentrated among Black males through much of the life span. Firearm suicides, on the other hand, are concentrated among White males, increasing sharply after age 70.
The mortality rates from firearm violence varied greatly among the states, with essentially no correlation between the rates of homicide and suicide.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now treats firearm-related deaths and injuries as a public health problem; it collects such data and publishes them via its Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System.
Report: Residential Areas With High Incarceration Rates Likely Suffer From Stress
Residents in neighborhoods with high incarceration rates are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety, according to a recent article in The New Republic.
The story quotes researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. They found elevated rates of major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder in neighborhoods with higher than average imprisonment rates.
The researchers reached the conclusion by cross-referencing address data from Michigan prison admissions files and mental health information from the Detroit Neighborhood Health Study, with additional information from 4,180 individuals questioned by phone, the author said.
“There’s absolutely no reason to believe that any of the damage done to mental health in Detroit is any different than it is in any other major city in this country,” said Katherine Keyes, an epidemiologist and one of the researchers in the study.
“The researchers found that removing large numbers of people from a community disrupts what they call the ‘social ecology.” It limits the availability of family and friends to provide the support, comfort, and assistance that helps sustain human mental health,” the author said. “In other words, when the threat of jail time is in the air, and your support network is diminished, the risk of major depression and debilitating anxiety grow.”
“A study showing that elevated community incarceration rates create ripple effects that unnerve human beings may sound obvious. But the findings matter (in) a country where nearly 3 percent of the adult population is in prison, on probation or parole, and federal officials estimate that one in three Black men will be ensnared in the criminal justice system in their lifetime,” the author cautioned.
Gov. Brown Gets Second Chance to Reshape Courts
Gov. Jerry Brown has had his second chance to reshape the nation’s most influential state court, the California Supreme Court, according to The New York Times.
In his first term, nearly 40 years ago, Brown appointed the first female chief justice, Rose E. Bird, to the California Supreme Court. Bird had never served as a judge and, along with two other judges Brown named to the court, was recalled by voters in an election in 1986.
This time around Brown has made three more nominations to the court. His choices “were the product of a long search that included consultations with two members of the U.S. Supreme Court,” The New York Times wrote.
“I was looking for people who you could say were ‘learned in the law’ – a phrase you might not hear too much anymore,” said Brown. “I put the word out: Are there people who are scholars or of unusual ability?”
“The three nominees share certain characteristics: They are quite young, they have impeccable qualifications and they are by all accounts brilliant,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine.
Like Bird, none of the three people Brown nominated had ever served a day as a judge. Justices Goodwin Liu and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar were law professors, and Justice Leondra R. Kruger was an associate attorney general. They are all under 45 and are all graduates of the Yale Law School.
“There is always a tension between appointing people who have already been judges and appointing people who have not previously been judges, but I think that’s an interesting balance for any court to have,” said Margaret H. Marshall, a former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Brown’s selections have also brought diversified backgrounds to the court. Liu is the child of Taiwanese parents; Cuéllar was born in Mexico; and Kruger is the first African-American to serve on the court since 2005.
Kruger’s confirmation has restored the court to a female majority.
“Legal scholars said that aside from Brown’s effort to inject more intellectual heft to the court, they expected that these appointments would move the court to the left,” The New York Times wrote.
For Brown, the new appointments were like “an opportunity for a bit of a do-over after the troubled appointment of Ms. Bird,” opined The New York Times.
A 2007 study by the University of California, Davis, Law Review said that the California Supreme Court was the most influential in the nation, having been cited the most by other courts in the preceding 65 years.
With the new appointments, “the court is well poised to really make a mark,” said Gerald F. Uelmen, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law. “And, I think that is what Gov. Brown is looking for: leaving a legacy that will restore the luster of the Supreme Court he knew when he clerked for the court.”
In his four terms as governor, Brown has appointed 11 justices to the state Supreme Court.
State Court Increases Scrutiny of Death Penalty Cases
In January, the California Supreme Court ruled that the death sentence of a man with a long criminal record was appropriate. On March 11, that ruling was rescinded.
The turnaround came after two justices appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar and Leondra R. Kruger, were sworn into the court on Jan. 5.
On the date they were sworn in, the previously constituted court issued a 4-3 ruling leaving in place a death sentence for Gary Lee Grimes.
Grimes’ lawyer requested the court to reconsider its ruling, and some anticipated it would. Grimes was convicted of capital murder committed during a home invasion. In the penalty phase of the trial, the trial judge excluded testimony that would have supported evidence that Grimes was not the actual killer, and the judge sentenced him to death.
Cuellar and Kruger joined the dissenters in deciding to rehear the case in the prior ruling, as did Justices Goodwin Liu, another of Brown’s appointees, and Kathryn M. Werdeger. The decision vacated the prior ruling and set the case for a new hearing.
None of the three Brown appointees previously served as judges. Liu and Cuellar were law professors, and Kruger was a U.S. Assistant Attorney General.
The Brown appointees may steer the court to decide to take a second look at another death penalty case, that of William Richards. Liu dissented in a 4-3 decision in 2012 that upheld Richards’ murder conviction.
After three trials, Richards was convicted of killing his wife. Two of the trials resulted in hung juries. A dental expert in the third trial identified Richards’ bite mark on his wife, but recanted the testimony after the jury returned a guilty verdict.
The California Legislature later passed a bill adding discredited forensic testimony as grounds for a new trial. The California Innocence Project has asked the California Supreme Court to consider the case again in light of the new law.
“Brown certainly seems to have reshaped this court in a fairly dramatic way”
“Brown certainly seems to have reshaped this court in a fairly dramatic way,” said Jan Stiglitz, a co-founder of the California Innocence Project. “Brown has brought in not just people from the outside but also people who don’t have this background that sort of predisposes them to be cynical in criminal cases.”
Searching for Accuracy In the Recidivism Rate
The states should move away from collecting and using recidivism data as a single number that uniformly defines success or failure in sentencing and corrections policy, urged a recent report by the Urban Institute.
The report points out that recidivism, the most commonly used definition of correctional success, is “most frequently reported as a single statewide rate, which is too imprecise to draw meaningful conclusions and insufficient for assessing the impact of changes to policy and practice.”
“Making recidivism a meaningful performance measure demands that states employ a wide range of reoffending metrics. States should shift their thinking about recidivism from reporting one number to developing a portfolio of outcome measures that assess the impact of correctional interventions,” the report said.
The report, titled “Improving Recidivism as a Performance Measure,” analyzed the movements of the states that participate in the Justice Reinvestment Initiative to change the way they approach criminal justice policy development and adoption. These states “engage in a data-driven process that targets the drivers of the correctional population and prison costs,” and as a result, “more than 20 states have enacted reforms to reduce correctional spending so that a portion of the savings can be reallocated to programs that improve public safety,” the report found.
Citing various data from the states, the report outlined four steps that it suggests are necessary to make recidivism a meaningful performance measure:
The first is to define recidivism using multiple measures of success.
Recidivism reduction is the responsibility of multiple agencies and many different actors. States “should think of recidivism as a series of different performance indicators that must be carefully calibrated to the outcome they are intended to measure.”
In addition to return to custody, states should also include desistance, time to failure, crime severity and behavior change as indicators of success.
Second, states should develop protocols to ensure data collections are consistent, accurate and timely.
The current reporting on recidivism by the states is inconsistent at best. “Ongoing data collection and analysis is necessary for any performance measure.”
In the data collection process, states should assign unique identifiers and link data across criminal justice agencies, develop long-term records, collect contextual information and update changes in status.
Third, analyses of data should account for the underlying composition of the population.
Recidivism will be a more useful performance measure when we can compare recidivism outcomes across populations. As a necessary precursor, statistical techniques that account for the risk level of the population being studied must be employed for this comparison.
“Risk-adjusted” recidivism rates – expected recidivism rates compared with actual observed rate of recidivism – should be used in analyzing recidivism across populations, such as, for example, parolees and max-outs.
Last, states should package the findings on recidivism to maximize its impact, and get the results into the hands of decision makers.
Recidivism analysis “has to be packaged succinctly and disseminated to the right audience to influence the direction of policy and practice.
“To maximize the impact of recidivism as a performance measure, states should provide annual information to decision makers in all three branches of the government, report a variety of recidivism information to measure success and summarize findings for policymakers.”
New ‘Blueprint’ Aims to Reduce Mass Incarceration
Inmates walking in H-Unit
A rare detailed plan to slash the 2.3 million population in the United States prisons and jails was published recently in a special issue of the journal Criminology and Public Policy.
The author is law professor Michael Tonry of the University of Minnesota. He laid out what he called a “blueprint” to remodel the American sentencing system to end mass incarceration.
“The severe sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s must be repealed or greatly cut back” and “meaningful limits, scaled to offense seriousness, must be placed on the lengths of lawful sentences,” said Tonry. He proposes:
Three strikes and mandatory minimum sentence laws must be repealed or at least narrowed in scope.
Life without parole sentences must be eliminated.
Repeal “truth in sentencing” laws, i.e., those reducing or eliminating good-time credits for certain crimes, such as California Penal Code Sections 2933.1 and 2933.2.
Sentences must match the seriousness of the crimes. Tonry proposes minimum sentences of one, two, four, six, eight or 10 years for serious offenses and longer for a small number of very serious cases.
Sentences must be embodied in sentencing guidelines established by state panels.
Every state should have a parole guideline system.
Every state should cut its incarceration total in half by 2020.
Inmates generally should be eligible for parole after serving five years, three years for those 35 or older.
However, Tonry also doubts that there is current political will to support his blueprint. He notes that there have been only “minor, marginal” amendments to sentencing laws by the states despite the high rates of incarceration.
Benefits of Yoga
“Research has shown that yoga offers great benefits for relieving stress and anxiety, something that is of great value for anyone living or working in a prison environment,” said James Fox, founder and director of the Prison Yoga Project.
Fox earned the credential as a yoga instructor in 2000. Deciding to bring the practice to people beyond the yoga studio, he has taught a bi-weekly class at San Quentin State Prison for 12 years.
Fox’s dedication has turned his class into something bigger: the Prison Yoga Project, an acclaimed and widely replicated model for bringing yoga into prisons around the country. “I’ve trained more than 800 yoga instructors who go teaching in institutions in different states,” Fox said.
“In 2012, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency assessed results of a small study of San Quentin prison projects, among them Fox’s,” reported The Yoga Journal. It found that inmates were calmer and had better emotional control and anger management after taking his class.
“It also concluded that such course offerings were ‘promising rehabilitation tools’ that could reduce recidivism, a welcome validation that is helping Fox expand the reach of the Prison Yoga Project,” continued the Yoga Journal.
Among Fox’s yoga instructor trainees is a Canadian provincial investigator, Chantele Theroux, who came across a photograph of inmates doing yoga at San Quentin and was inspired. She later sought Fox’s training and traveled to San Quentin to check out his program.
“Because they’ve learned how to breathe and calm themselves down and not just react in the face of challenge and ego, there’s less violence. You can feel it,” Theroux said. “Not once did I feel intimidated, scared, worried, concerned for my safety.”
Theroux later spoke for prison yoga programs at a conference of the Canadian Criminal Justice Association.
Fox has even helped establish prison yoga programs in Norway, Germany and the Netherlands.
“What kind of person do you want returning to society?” Fox asks. “If you don’t offer prisoners these types of programs, they’re not going to improve. They are only going to get worse.
“What kind of person do you want to run into at the grocery store?” he asked rhetorically.
‘Overcrowding Mandate Is No Issue in Parole Grants’
The rise in California life prisoners’ parole grants has had nothing to do with the federal court mandate to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons, said Gov. Jerry Brown’s office.
“The prison population has no bearing on the governor’s decision to reverse or not act on a parole grant,” said Evan Westrup, a spokesperson for Brown.
“Authorities say the higher numbers are primarily the result of a state Supreme Court decision in 2008 that set a new legal standard for the Board of Parole Hearings and the Governor’s Office to use when determining who is suitable for parole,” reported the San Diego Union Tribune.
Until the early 2000s, the prospects were slim for prisoners sentenced to life with the possibility of parole in California ever to walk out of prison. According to the California Lifer Newsletter, Gov. Gray Davis paroled only eight life prisoners during his administration from 1999 to 2003.
But things have changed. In 2008, the state Supreme Court decided that parole could not be denied simply because the life prisoner’s crime was “heinous, atrocious or cruel.” The denial must be based on whether the prisoner remains a danger to public safety if released.
In 2009, a federal three-judge court decided that overcrowding in California’s prisons was the primary cause for the state’s failure to provide adequate medical care to its prisoners. It ordered a cap on the state prison population of 137.5 percent of design capacity and required Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to submit plans to reduce overcrowding in the state prisons.
Since then the numbers of lifer prisoners paroled have steadily increased, from 221 in 2009 to 596 in 2013, according to the San Diego Union Tribune. This year, more than 280 life prisoners were paroled from prison as of June 30.
State law bars the parole board from taking prison overcrowding into account when making its decisions. However, there may be a perception that the issues are related because of the state’s efforts to comply with the federal court order, said Jennifer Shaffer, executive officer of the Board of Parole Hearings.
Study Reveals Decline in Juvenile and Adult Crime Rates and Incarceration
California has seen drastic drops in the rates of youth and adult incarceration in the past decades, accompanied by declines in the youth and adult crime rates, says Mike Males of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.
The state’s rate of youth incarceration has dropped 60 percent compared to that in 1996, and its rate of adult incarceration is 24 percent compared to 1999, according to Males.
“California has all but abolished state imprisonment and has sharply reduced local incarceration of youths to the lowest levels ever recorded – by far,” Males said in a March report.
Males reported that there was “a 60 percent drop in the rate of youth incarceration in 17 years, along with a huge shift toward local and shorter terms” and that the current rate “probably (stood) at an all-time low.”
In 1996, 20,793 California youths were locked up – 10,115 in state-run youth facilities and 10,678 in local juvenile halls and camps – in a total youth population (ages 10 to 17) of 3.7 million, he said.
As of Dec. 31, 2013, California held only 9,336 youths behind bars – just 683 in state-run youth facilities and 8,653 in local juvenile halls and camps. This is in spite of the fact that the teenaged youth population has grown to 4.1 million since 1996, he added.
Males also reported “an unprecedented reduction in adult incarceration” in the state – adult prisoners decreased by 30,000 since 1999.
About 240,000 adults were held in California state prisons and local jails on an average day in 1999 in an adult population (ages 18 to 69) of 21.7 million, according to Males. In 2013, only 217,000 were incarcerated in an adult population of 25.8 million. “That’s a decline in the adult incarceration rate of 24 percent in 14 years, back to the level of 1993,” he said.
Such decline in incarcerations “was largely forced on the state by court mandates and budget constraints,” Males concluded. Yet California’s youth crime rate plummeted to its lowest level since 1957, and adult violent crime declined since 1999 through the first half of 2013, he said.
“While large-scale de-incarceration of youth and low-level adult offenders in favor of alternative strategies may contribute to long-term benefits, the size of California’s crime decrease, especially among youth, suggests much larger forces are at work.” He commented that “locking up lots of younger and lesser offenders is not vital to public safety today and opens up discussion beyond the simplistic debates of the past surrounding get-tough measures and sentencing reform.”