Recently in Prisons Category

OK, that's not exactly what Vice President Biden said today, but it's not that far off either.  What he actually said, in campaigning for the proposed American Jobs  Act, was that Flint, Michigan needs the federal money the Act would provide in order to hire more policemen, and thus depress what has been a rising murder rate.  The story is here.

It's true that Flint has been laying off police officers, and that its murder rate has  gone up.  I'm also willing to assume, since the evidence nationwide supports it, that hiring more police depresses violent (and other) crime.

But the broader, underlying idea  --  that the recession and associated decrease in local revenue and spending has contributed to the murder rate  --  is baloney.  Instead, to the "bafflement" of inter alia the New York Times, the murder rate, and the crime rate generally, has continued to decline, and decline significantly, during the recession.  Kent and I (here and here) have discussed the main reason for this fact, and it's not all that hard to figure out.  Crime has gone down because the imprisonment of the people who commit it has gone up.  This has been true for a generation, in good times and bad.

I am thus pleased to be able to tell our Vice President that, while we might not need the jobs bill, it would be quite helpful if we kept our nerve and our wits and refused to give in to the anguished cries  of "incarceration nation."  

Plata's legalized jailbreak has begun.

We have been assured, as we always are with these things, that only "nonviolent, nonserious and nonsexual offen[ders] will be released back to the county probation system."  Kent made quick work of that one.  And that's not counting the eye-opening story described in the first paragraph of this  entry.

Time to get a Rottweiler.

Want a million more serious crimes each year?  Two thousand more murders?  Five thousand more rapes?  Last week, the New York Times told us how to get them.

On Thursday, the Times published this editorial decrying mandatory minimum sentences and the dramatic increase in the prison population they have helped bring about.  Perhaps the key assertion in urging repeal of these laws was the claim that they "have helped fill prisons without increasing public safety."

That claim is false.  Because of what it is enlisted to help bring about, it is also astoundingly dangerous.

Twenty years ago in 1991, near the dawn of "incarceration nation," there were 14,872,900 serious, non-drug crimes in the United States. Last year there were 10,329,135 -- a crime decrease of about 4,543,760.  The numbers, taken from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, depict  --  contrary to the Times  --  a huge and unprecedented improvement in public safety.

Levitt and Spelman, in a Universtiy of Chicago analysis, concurred in by James Q. Wilson of UCLA, have found that "one-quarter or more" of the decrease in the number of crimes is because more people are being imprisoned and for longer.

One-quarter of 4,543,760 is 1,135,940.  In other words, we have a staggering 1,135,940 fewer serious, non-drug crimes per year now than 20 years ago because of mandatory minimums and other statutes increasing incarceration.

If we go back to the bad old days of yesteryear when we bought phony promises of rehabilitation and were less inclined toward imprisonment, this is what the numbers tell us we can expect each year:  More than 2,400 more murder victims, 5,400 more forcible rape victims, 78,000 aggravated assault victims, and hundreds of thousands more victims of robbery, burglary and auto theft.

The toll is staggering. 

The New York Times and the chorus of others who want to reverse the gains we have made through imprisonment should tell us, and loudly, how much of this blood curdling increase in crime victimization they are willing to accept. 

In the age of cutbacks to the criminal justice system, one thing we should preserve  --  yea, expand  --  is, we are told, job training for inmates.  In principle, this makes perfect sense.  If inmates don't have job skills, you don't have to be a genius to figure out what they're going to do to get money once they're released. 

But what, exactly, is the government's version of "job training?"  This would seem to be a central question, but I seldom see it asked.  A recent Wall Street Journal piece took a look.  The job training it surveyed was not specifically designed for inmates, but it's reasonable to assume that what inmates get won't be any better (when is it ever?).

What the WSJ found was that "job training" imparts, not so much marketable skills, as a combination of freebies for politicians, bad work habits for trainees, and outright nonsense.  For example:

...the Job Training Partnership Act, JTPA , spent lavishly--to expand an Indiana circus museum, teach Washington taxi drivers to smile, provide foreign junkets for state and local politicians, and bankroll business relocations. According to the Labor Department's inspector general, young trainees were twice as likely to rely on food stamps after JTPA involvement than before since the "training" often included instructions on applying for an array of government benefits.****

[The recent] stimulus package expanded federally funded summer jobs. And so young men and women used puppets to greet aquarium visitors in Boston. Teens in Washington, D.C.'s Green Summer Jobs Corps maintained "school-yard butterfly habitats." And summer workers in Florida, the Orlando Sentinel reported, "practiced firm handshakes to ensure that employers quickly understand their serious intent to work."

The article is depressing but revealing.  It's a primer on what to bear in mind the next time you're lectured about the virtues of "job training."

Rong-Gong Lin II reports in the L.A. Times:

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said a new state law to force counties, instead of the state, to jail non-violent felons is a "horribly flawed plan" that would increase crime on the streets.

"Public safety will be seriously jeopardized," Cooley said Tuesday. "We're not kidding. There will be tens of thousands of people let out all over California, who would otherwise be incarcerated.... I've been predicting ... that there will be a spike in crime.

"The state Legislature is abandoning their highest-priority core mission in terms of public safety, shifting it to the counties. And it is a bait and switch. They had a big fiscal problem, so they're abandoning a core mission and the county's going to pick up the pieces, and the public is going to pay the price," Cooley told reporters outside the L.A. County Hall of Administration.

Cooley said there's not enough room in the county jails to house felons who would otherwise go to state prison. Already, county jails are being forced to release their own inmates early.

Cooley is well known in the state (and disliked by some of the hard-core DAs) for his restrained use of the Three Strikes law.  The people who have applauded him for that restraint need to listen to him now.  This bill was a terrible idea, and it needs to be repealed.

Update:  Thomas Watkins of AP has this story on the same subject.  On the SF Chron website, the article is headlined "LA district attorney frets over parolee transfer."  Imagine if the same headline writer had been around on the 18th of April in '75:  "Paul Revere frets over the British coming."

Rong-Gong Lin reports in the LAT:

Los Angeles County supervisors on Tuesday condemned Sacramento's cost-cutting decision to keep some state prisoners in local lockups and have parolees be supervised by county agencies, asserting that both would lead to an increase in crime.

*                               *                            *

[County Supervisor Michael] Antonovich said it is likely that Los Angeles County will run out of jail beds unless it "uses other models of supervisions such as electronic monitoring, work furloughs, weekenders and GPS tracking."

"It's irresponsible for us to turn around and dump these [prisoners] into our communities with an ankle bracelet and hope they don't re-offend," Antonovich said. Without finding a way to increase prison time, Antonovich said, "I believe we'll have a spike in crime."

Liberals are arguing that, in order to save money (they've recently discovered that saving money is important), we need to cut back on the number of criminals we imprison.  They've spent years losing the argument that criminals don't deserve to be in the slammer, but they're increasingly winning the argument that it costs too much to keep them there.

What to do?  Well, we could remind ourselves that securing the physical safety of our citizens from dangerous people is government's first obligation.  We could also remind ourselves that just punishment should not be left to accountants, however important accountants might be in other contexts.

Failing that, however, we could quit giving hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists and criminals and use that money to fight them instead of reward them.

The story, Taliban, criminals get $360 million from US taxes, is here.

Don Thompson reports for AP:

Facebook has agreed to work with law enforcement agencies nationwide to remove accounts set up by inmates or posted on their behalf, in part because prisoners are using the social networking site to stalk victims and direct criminal activity, California prison officials said Monday.

It's the latest effort to combat a problem that has grown with the advent of smart phones and social networking sites.

Last year a convicted child molester used a cell phone smuggled into prison to search his victim's Facebook and MySpace web pages, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in announcing the agreement with Facebook. The inmate then sent sketches to the 17-year-old victim's home.

The great state of California is all but bankrupt.  There's no money to be found.  It's been ordered to release over 30,000 prisoners because the funding is not there to keep them in what a (slim) Supreme Court majority views as constitutionally adequate conditions.  The state legislature seems poised to order a referendum to abolish the death penalty, based principally on the argument that, deserved or not, it's just too expensive.

The state education system has not been spared. UC San Diego will no longer offer a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master's program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature.

Still, while the State's foremost obligation  --  the physical safety of its citizens  --  and long-honored fundamentals of its university system take a hit, some things escape.  As Heather MacDonald reports, the "diversity" leviathon is going great guns:

Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time "vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion." This position would augment UC San Diego's already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor's Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women's Center.

Translation:  While the already bloated culture of victimization gets a geyser of funding to take over the state's universities, the number of actual victims  --  of recidivist crime, that is  --  is headed for a big increase, because there's no money left to see to their safety.

The British think tank Policy Exchange has a report on prison labor titled Inside Job.  Press release is here; full text is here.  From the press release:

The report recommends a whole new prison work regime based on full-time, paid employment that is run by private companies, profit-driven and commissioned by prison governors. Offenders would still go to prison - but regimes would do much more to offer proper work for inmates to make them more employable on release. Privileges - like in-cell TVs - should be reformed to focus on those who work and paid for out of wages. The result would be more prisoners working, with the most engaged and compliant prisoners getting privileges from work.

A new 'Category W' of prisoner - low security risk, drug free and literate - would be allowed to apply for a job and earn a 'prisoner minimum wage' of £3.10 an hour. This net wage could be split three ways between victims, resettlement, and a management charge - retained by the prison. A prisoner would 'take home' around 70p per hour and a resettlement savings pot for use on release could provide for costs like a rent deposit.

At today's exchange rate of 1.63$/£, that would be $5.05 gross and $1.14 take home.

James Slack has this story in the Daily Mail.  Alan Travis has this story in the Guardian.  Kevin Schofield has this story in the Sun.  The Sun story sports a graphic of an English judge's wig with the caption "The Sun says no to soft justice."  I would link to the graphic, but the Sun apparently does not want bloggers to do that.

Tom Meyer had the above picture, worth a thousand words, in the SF Chron.

The National Association of Drug Court Professionals has this publication titled The Facts on Marijuana by Douglas Marlowe.  Fact number one refutes the curiously persistent myth that legalization of marijuana would solve our prison crowding issues.  Nonsense.

It is exceedingly rare to be incarcerated in the U.S. for the use or possession of marijuana. According to the National Center on Addiction & Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA, 2010), less than 1 percent (0.9%) of jail and prison inmates in the U.S. were incarcerated for marijuana possession as their sole offense.

Excluding jail detainees who may be held pending booking or release on bond, the rates are even lower. Prison inmates sentenced for marijuana possession account for 0.7 percent of state prisoners and 0.8 percent of federal prisoners (see Table).  And, considering that many of those prisoners pled down from more serious charges, the true incarceration rate for marijuana possession can only be described as negligible.

CJLF has not taken a position on the legalization question as such.  But to the extent that false arguments used in that debate impact the larger debates on sentencing policy, it is important to point out when they are bogus.  The claim that we can safely release large numbers of prison inmates because many of them are just harmless pot-smokers is false and dangerous.

In this video, WSJ's Jason Riley interviews Heritage's Cully Stimson on the retroactive application of the crack sentencing reductions.  Riley also brings up the Plata decision and notes that the law-abiding people of poor neighborhoods will suffer most from the release of criminals, most of whom will be headed back to those neighborhoods.

Somebody at WSJ Online gave the video the regrettable caption "What is Obama Smoking?"  That's really beyond the pale, folks.  This is the Wall Street Journal, not the New York Post.

When the Supreme Court, 5-4, affirmed the California prisoner release order, it very strongly hinted that if the State asked for more time, the panel should grant it.  This post on the LA Times politics blog indicates Gov. Brown will indeed ask for more time.

Now, the three judges on this panel don't actually give a hoot what the Supreme Court thinks.  They are the most pro-criminal, anti-law-enforcement panel in the history of the federal judiciary.  However, they know that the State has an appeal as of right to the Supreme Court.  Unlike almost all other cases, the high court has to take it if asked.  So Judge Reinhardt's "they can't reverse them all" maxim doesn't apply here.  So maybe they actually will pay attention to what the Supreme Court said.  Maybe.

Kent gives Marc Howard the benefit of a doubt when he marks up to laziness, rather than deceit, Mr. Howard's claim that most of those to be released under Plata will be more-or-less harmless people.

I don't know Marc Howard, so Kent might be right.  Still, I have my doubts.  Lying about the facts has become a standard part of the Left's debate inventory, along with its first cousin, smearing the opposition.

What paricularly arouses my suspicion is the breezy contempt Howard uses in introducing his soothing "information" about the prospective releasees (emphasis added):  "[Conservatives'] panic-stricken reaction conveniently ignores the fact that more prisoners are incarcerated as a result of property, drug, public order, and other crimes than of violent crimes--and presumably the former would stand to benefit from early release."

Notice that there is no such thing as legitimate concern  --  only "panic-stricken reaction."  Notice also that conservatives "conveniently ignore"  --  guess what  --  exactly the "fact" that isn't a fact at all (and that would therefore be a really good candidate to, ummmm, get ignored!)  Notice further that the thousands of inmates to be released are presumably of the harmless variety  --  said presumption being based on  --  well, what?

Answer: willful blindness and wishful thinking.  Kinda like "hope and change," to coin a phrase.  Except it gets worse, because (a) presuming that thousands of release decisions will be made correctly by the very system whose years of colossal ineptitude required such decsions to start with would seem, uh, moderately stupid; and (b) within the last 48 hours, we learned that California, without the haste and pressure of a court order, nonetheless released to non-revocable parole hundreds of criminals with "a high risk of violence."  But not to worry, now that it has the courts breathing down its neck, and many times the number of release decisions that must be made, California will, we can all presume, be releasing only Mr. Nicey.

I respectfully suggest that the better presumption is that California residents do what I did the day I graduated from Stanford Law School, i.e., move to Virginia.