Trend to Lighten Harsh Sentences Catches On in ...



[6 articles count as 1 rdg. for RDP’s and Rdgs Notes -- changes in imprisonment policy – lighter sentences]

California Voters Pass Proposition 47 Sentencing Reform

November 5, 2014



California voters have approved Proposition 47, a ballot measure that will reclassify six low-level property and drug offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. These offenses include shoplifting, theft, and check fraud under $950, as well as personal use of most illegal drugs. State savings resulting from the measure are estimated to be at least $150 million a year and will be used to support school truancy and dropout prevention, victim services, mental health and drug abuse treatment, and other programs designed to expand alternatives to incarceration… [Dunn cut rest]

California election results defy national trends -- mostly

By Phil Willon

Nov. 5, 2014

LA Times



…California voters Tuesday also put California at the forefront of the nation’s drug decriminalization debate by approving sweeping changes to California’s drug laws, making possession of heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and other illicit drugs a misdemeanor instead of a felony.

With passage of Proposition 47, an estimated 40,000 offenders a year would qualify for lighter sentences. The ballot measure also reduced petty theft – stealing property worth $950 or less – from a felony to misdemeanor for all but the most violent criminals. Managers of Los Angeles County jails said they were prepared to immediately release offenders whose cases are reclassified by the courts as misdemeanors…[Dunn cut rest]

U.S. Prison Population Drops for Third Year as States Adopt New Policy Strategies

August 08, 2013



After reaching a high of 1 in 100 adults behind bars in 2008, the U.S. prison population has now declined for three consecutive years. According to new data released by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of offenders in state prisons decreased 2.1 percent during 2012. The state imprisonment rate also dropped by 2.6 percent. The federal prison population continued to grow, though at a slower pace than in recent years.

Although conventional wisdom holds that the downward trend is driven by the economy, more important changes are actually behind the movement to contain prison growth.

“Tight budgets are generating initial interest, but they’re not the driving force behind such significant reforms,” says Adam Gelb, director of Pew’s public safety performance project. “What’s really motivating the change is the success that states like Texas have had in cutting both crime and costs; supportive public opinion, especially among some conservative leaders; and growing awareness that there are research-based alternatives that cost less than prison and work better to reduce recidivism,” Gelb adds.

In 2007, Texas averted huge projected prison growth when state legislators approved a data-driven plan that invested more than $241 million in evidence-based strategies to reduce recidivism. Since these reforms were enacted, state taxpayers have avoided nearly $2 billion in new prison spending, the parole failure rate is down 39 percent, and the statewide crime rate has fallen back to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Since the Texas reforms, about half of the states have adopted new criminal justice policies to rein in the size and cost of their corrections systems. Often with overwhelming bipartisan votes, state policymakers have changed sentencing laws for lower-level offenders and strengthened less-costly alternatives to prison.[Dunn cut rest for space reasons]

Trend to Lighten Harsh Sentences Catches On in Conservative States

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

New York Times

August 12, 2011



WASHINGTON — Fanned by the financial crisis, a wave of sentencing and parole reforms is gaining force as it sweeps across the United States, reversing a trend of “tough on crime” policies that lasted for decades and drove the nation’s incarceration rate to the highest — and most costly — level in the developed world.

While liberals have long complained that harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenses like drug possession are unjust, the push to overhaul penal policies has been increasingly embraced by elected officials in some of the most conservative states in the country. And for a different reason: to save money.

Some early results have been dramatic. In 2007, Texas was facing a projected shortfall of about 17,000 inmate beds by 2012. But instead of building and operating new prison space, the State Legislature decided to steer nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and to expand re-entry programs designed to help recently released inmates avoid returning to custody.

As a result, the Texas prison system is now operating so far under its capacity that this month it is closing a 1,100-bed facility in Sugar Land — the first time in the state’s history that a prison has closed. Texas taxpayers have saved hundreds of millions of dollars, and the changes have coincided with the violent crime rate’s dipping to its lowest level in 30 years.

“In Texas for the last few years we’ve been driving down both the crime rate and the incarceration rate,” said Marc Levin, the director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which helped draft the state’s corrections overhaul. “And it’s not just Texas. South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio in the past year or so have done major reforms. These are certainly not liberal states. That is significant.”

More than a dozen states in recent years have taken steps to reduce the costs to taxpayers of keeping so many criminals locked up. As crime rates have steadily declined to 40-year lows, draining the political potency from crime fears, the fiscal crunch has started to prompt a broad rethinking about alternatives to incarceration.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a wave of stiff new sentencing laws, from mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession to California’s three-strikes law imposing an automatic life sentence for a third felony conviction. Partly as a result, the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, now accounts for 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Taxpayers are spending about $50 billion a year on state corrections systems — nearly twice as much, in inflation-adjusted terms, as expenditures in 1987, according to the Pew Center on the States.

Even before the financial crisis settled in, a handful of states, including New York, had begun experimenting with softening mandatory sentences for drug crimes, driven by a mix of concerns about effectiveness, fairness and cost. Texas, an early innovator, mandated probation for low-level possession of many drugs in 2003, before enacting its far more sweeping overhaul of incarceration policies in 2007.

But in the past two years, many more states have enacted — or are considering adopting in their 2012 legislative sessions — similar policies, including reducing prison time for low-level drug offenders or diverting them into treatment; granting early release to well-behaved or elderly inmates; expanding job training and re-entry programs; and instituting penalties other than a return to prison for technical violations of parole or probation, like missing a meeting.

… [Dunn cut some] The movement has attracted the support of several prominent conservatives, including Edwin R. Meese III, the attorney general during the Reagan administration. He is part of a campaign, called “Right on Crime,” which was begun last December to lend weight to what it calls the “conservative case for reform.”

“I’d call it a careful refining of the process,” Mr. Meese said. “Most of us who are involved in this are very much in favor of high incarceration of serious habitual offenders. The whole idea is getting the right people in prison, and for those people for whom there is evidence that chances of recidivism are less, to work with those people.”

Other Republican affiliates of the group include former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; Grover Norquist, an antitax activist; Asa Hutchinson, a former director of the Drug Enforcement Administration; and William J. Bennett, a former White House “drug czar.”

The movement has seen some reversals. At least three states — Washington, Kansas and Delaware — have cut spending on re-entry programs to help close short-term budget gaps, despite criticism that the cuts could result in higher long-term costs if more parolees returned to prison.

In addition, at least three other states — Illinois, New Jersey and Wisconsin — suspended or revoked programs that allowed well-behaved inmates to earn early parole. Earlier this year, for example, New Jersey repealed such a program after two former inmates who had been released early were charged with murders.

Vanita Gupta, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which published a report this week on the corrections overhaul movement, said that such setbacks showed the fragility of the effort. Ms. Gupta said statistics-based arguments had historically fared poorly in the political arena when countered by anecdotes of specific crimes. .. [Dunn cut rest]

Economy's toll: Kansas cuts model prison parole program

Rick Montgomery | Kansas City Star

April 04, 2010



KANSAS CITY, Kan. —

Lewis was babbling. "I can see things. … There are signs out there coming from The Beast." One of his arms moved randomly above the black bandanna around his head, as if to swipe away cobwebs.

The man rocking in his seat before parole officer Chris Jorgensen in the drab, tiny Department of Corrections office in Kansas City, Kan., was one of 6,000 released convicts whom the state budget is doing less to help.

Treatment and support services for Lewis, who did time on a theft charge, and other inmates re-entering society cost $12.6 million two years ago. That was when mental health care, job training and community residential programs for people on parole helped make Kansas a national model for success.

Now the model has been dismantled. For the fiscal year beginning July, the corrections department will get about $5.3 million to fund those programs under Gov. Mark Parkinson’s budget recommendations.

To the taxpayer and government officials desperately trying to balance the state’s books, the short-term savings are hard to resist.

But experts know that a convict ill-prepared for “re-entry” — especially in this job market — may mean only rising crime in the coming years.

Should Lewis violate his parole and be taken off the street, it will cost about $25,000 each year to incarcerate him.

With burgeoning state budget crises affecting life as Kansans and Missourians know it, officer Jorgensen saw a more immediate crisis sitting in front of his desk.

“What is it you need, Lewis?” he said calmly, sensing a meltdown. “Tell me what you need. Do you feel the medicine is helping you?”

“I feel I need a witness, like it says in the Bible. … I believe I’m the Christ of all people.”

Jorgensen heard nothing coherent. He made a note to drive his schizophrenic client back to the mental health center as soon as his case load allowed.

It was then that Lewis, who is living with relatives, made a comment so striking in its clarity, so truthful, it seemed to crackle down the hall: “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

He broke into sobs and asked that his full name not appear in this story. The two hugged — a trembling, disheveled man and his parole officer — before the next parolee sat down.

A crown jewel fades

The Kansas method of preparing inmates for re-entering society was considered the crown jewel of correctional systems worldwide. Congress in 2008 established “Second Chance” grants to help other states create the kinds of programs launched in Kansas — for drug rehabilitation, education, family reintegration and transitional housing.

Recidivism rates — the percent of ex-convicts committing new crimes — had in 2007 plunged statewide to 2.2 percent, less than half the recidivism of the early part of the decade.

The number of parolees re-convicted for felonies fell 36 percent. The total prison population and new admissions also were on the decline, enabling the Department of Corrections to project that Kansas needn’t worry about expanding its prison capacity for 10 years.

The recession and consecutive budget blowouts have thrown that momentum into reverse.

“Just like that — the national model we created no longer exists,” said state Rep. Pat Colloton, a Leawood Republican who leads the House Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice. “We were written up in The Wall Street Journal. I was invited to the White House,” when then-President George W. Bush signed legislation directing $54 million in federal grants to help duplicate Kansas’ success around the country…

Gone from most Kansas communities are the structured group-living arrangements that provided offenders a bed, counseling and supervision while they sought full-time work or fought off addictions.

The department last year discontinued such residential programs in Topeka, Wichita and Kansas City, Kan. A treatment program for sex offenders at the Norton Correctional Facility ended.

In Jorgensen’s office, the parolees said they wanted to make it on the outside.

“It’s easy to get back in — to just lie down in your cell and let the state take care of you,” said Mike Buie, paroled in 2008 after a five-year stint for robbery and attempted battery. “What’s hard is to make it out here. …

“I understand if people do feel safe in their homes, safe going shopping, with criminals locked away. But to really feel safe, you’re going to have to focus on the people getting out.”

Buie has spent 18 of his 44 years behind bars. For him, being out and avoiding trouble for the last two is an achievement. But state budget cuts have limited his eligibility for MediKan insurance benefits to 18 months, and the medication Buie needs to control his bipolar disorder is running out.

“Leaves me high and dry” until he can collect disability benefits next year, Buie said: “I’m waiting for the grass to finish growing so I can mow some neighbors’ lawns.”… [Dunn cut rest]

New rules slashing crack cocaine sentences go into effect[pic]

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NBy Carol Cratty, CNN

November 01, 2011

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For thousands of prison inmates convicted of crack cocaine charges, the prison doors will be opening early, thanks to sentencing changes easing the disparity between the penalties for possessing or distributing crack vs. powder cocaine.

Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act in August 2010, changing the 100-to-1 disparity between minimum sentences for crack and powder cocaine to 18 to 1. The U.S. Sentencing Commission voted this summer to make the reduced crack penalties retroactive, which means more than 12,000 current inmates are eligible to request reduced sentences.

The retroactivity took effect Tuesday. The Sentencing Commission estimates that inmates will have an average of three years chopped off their sentences. An estimated 1,800 inmates became eligible for release immediately because they had already served enough time, and prosecutors did not object to their release.

Critics of the old sentencing system say it was unfair to African-Americans, who make up the majority of those convicted of possessing and distributing crack.

"This really has been one of the great stains on our federal criminal justice system for 20 years or more," said Michael Nachmanoff, the federal public defender for the Eastern District of Virginia. "This disparity between the punishment for crack cocaine and powder was really unjustified."

Nachmanoff noted under the old guidelines someone who had just 5 grams of crack cocaine would receive a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. But someone would have to have 500 grams of powdered cocaine to receive a similar sentence… [Dunn cut a couple paragraphs for space reasons]

But even with the changes, there is still an 18-to-1 disparity in sentences for crack and powder cocaine offenses. Nachmanoff said now a person with crack will have to have 28 grams before triggering a mandatory five-year minimum sentence. But the person with powder cocaine still must have a much larger amount -- at least 500 grams.

"Ultimately the right answer is 1 to 1, and people in the law enforcement community and the criminal justice system recognize that," said Nachmanoff. "But that just means that there's still more work to do." … [Dunn cut rest]

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