Recently in Prisons Category

Two federal corrections workers who were on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan detention cell have been indicted on federal charges in connection with the disgraced financier's death, according to charges unsealed Tuesday.

John F. Pfaff's Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform is probably the best book on so-called mass incarceration to date. Its great strength is that it is empirically grounded. Pfaff, a professor of law at Fordham, doesn't cherry-pick data to support some a priori theory, he grapples with the hard realities that the data present. As he well understands, this makes his argument for reducing imprisonment a very tough sell.

After all, if violent crime and other serious offenses are the primary reasons for incarceration then why should we reduce imprisonment? And if we still wish to disincarcerate, despite the compelling reasons for all the lockups, then how might this be achieved? Unfortunately, Pfaff's answers to these questions are the least persuasive portions of his book.

In the roughly 8 1/2 years since California lawmakers embarked on an historic sentencing reform campaign, homicides in the state's county jails have increased by 46%.  Alyssa Hodenfield and John Walker of the Sacramento Bee report that the state's effort to eliminate prison overcrowding has transformed jails into violent and overcrowded mini-prisons with neither the resources, training, or the facilities to serve the influx of hardened repeat felons no longer eligible for prison.  In October of 2011, Governor Brown's "Public Safety Realignment" law, AB 109, took effect.  The law shifted sentences for habitual property and drug offenders from prison to county jails, requiring jails originally designed to hold drunks and petty thieves for a year or less to accommodate habitual drug dealers, wife beaters, car thieves, and commercial burglars for years rather than months.  While the state has classified these offenders as low risk for violence, many are violent, gang-affiliated criminals.  The article cites a study by the Public Policy Institute of California that AB 109 has not had an effect on public safety, although the FBI Uniform Crime Report has shown increased violent crime in California for 2015, 2016, and 2017.  This is the first three-year increase in violent crime since 1992.  Also, as noted in earlier posts, thousands of property crimes converted to misdemeanors by Proposition 47, are no longer reported to police, meaning while the overall crime rate (violent+property) appears slightly lower, this is a false indicator.

Leaders of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood prison gang were indicted in Federal Court Thursday for ordering killings, smuggling drugs, cigarettes and cell phones.  Stan Stanton of the Sacramento Bee reports that the charges are the result of a years long investigation by federal authorities into the gang's activities both in and outside of California prisons. Wiretaps monitored over 1,800 phone calls during the investigation disclosing orders from the gang's leaders for killings, and allowing agents to warn some of the targets before they became victims.  Among the 16 gang members indicted by U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott were two of the gang's leaders, both serving life terms for murder.  Both filed lawsuits against the state regarding solitary confinement at the high security prison at Pelican Bay.  The suits sparked a well- publicized 2014 hunger strike by inmates that resulted in Governor Brown softening state policy and allowing more of the gang's members into the general population.  Investigators say this enabled the gang to expand its illegal activities.  The head of the state prison system, Ralph Diaz disputes this, defending his department's handling of prisons.

Sherri Lydon, US Attorney for South Carolina, has this op-ed in the WSJ, calling for Congress to amend communications law so that state prisons can jam smuggled cell phones, just as federal prisons do. Inmates use the phones to continue running their crime organizations from within prison.

But having passed the First Step Act, lawmakers should be cautious about the next step. Progressives believe that the U.S. overincarcerates and needs to cut back sharply on the number of people in jails and prisons. But the "mass incarceration" claim doesn't withstand much scrutiny.

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What about overpunishment? Are penalties so harsh that American prisons are filled with men and women who are languishing there for decades because of some youthful indiscretion? That is the image the disincarceration movement wants to conjure up. But it is false.

First, 23% of felons convicted of violent crimes are sentenced to no incarceration whatever. Second, nearly 80% of state prison inmates are released before serving their full terms. If we measure punishment by actual time served, the picture is not disturbing. Some might argue that America has an underpunishment problem.

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The risk in the second step of criminal-justice reform is that it goes too far. The justice system, flawed though it is, provides incentives to desist from crime. The weaker it gets, the greater the risk of a significant crime increase. That happened in the late 1960s: When the crime tsunami began, the system caved in. Police arrested fewer offenders, and courts imposed fewer and lighter punishments. That contributed to the 20th century's worst sustained violent-crime wave.

There is a major political push going on to get law enforcement organizations to flip and support the badly drafted and ill-conceived legislation titled the "First Step Act," which I prefer to call the Faux Pas Act.  See this post.

The drive to put ever more criminals and more dangerous ones on the streets gathers steam, funded by Soros money on the left and Koch money on the libertarian side, leaving relatively few defenders of the strong and sensible policies that have been a major factor in the tremendous drop in crime since the peak in the early 1990s.  Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is one of the few, and he has this op-ed in the WSJ with the above headline.

While the House bill has some flaws, the Senate can fix them on a bipartisan basis. But under no circumstances should Congress cut mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes or give judges more discretion to reduce those sentences. That foolish approach is not criminal-justice reform--it's a jailbreak that would endanger communities and undercut President Trump's campaign promise to restore law and order.