Recently in Rehabilitation Category

Kristine Phillips reports for the WaPo:

In 1991, Michigan man Gregory Green stabbed his wife in the face and chest, killing her and their unborn child. Then, he called 911 and waited for police to come.

After serving about 16 years in prison for murder, Green was released on parole with the support of family and friends, including a pastor who lobbied on his behalf and whose daughter Green would marry.

"Gregory and I were friends before his mishap and he was incarcerated," Fred Harris, a pastor in Detroit, wrote to the Michigan parole board in August 2005. "He was a member of our church ... I feel he has paid for his unfortunate lack of self control and the damage he has caused as much as possible and is sorry."

"If he was to be released he would be welcomed as a part of our church community and whatever we could do to help him adjust, we would," Harris wrote again a year later.

Green was released in 2008 and later married Faith Harris. They had two daughters, Koi, 5, and Kaliegh, 4.

A heart-warming story from the Land of the Second Chance, right?  Read on.

While Barack Obama, surrounded with the world's best security detail, opens the prison gates to hundreds of dealers in hard drugs  --  dozens with firearms convictions as well  -- citizens living in less secure circumstances suffer.

Unfortunately, no system is perfect, and in those isolated instances in which problems are identified, we work with our law enforcement partners to address them moving forward.

In a news release yesterday the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced that the recidivism rate for offenders released from state prison has declined steadily over the past five years and is now down to 44.6%.  Responding to these numbers CDCR Secretary Scott Kernan said, "The latest recidivism rate shows that we're helping more inmates learn how to live a law-abiding, productive life."  This statement is easily worthy of ten Pinocchios.  As the report notes the CDCR bases recidivism rates on how many criminals return to state prison for a new felony conviction or a parole violation within three years of their release.  Secretary Kernan must assume that everybody forgot that five years ago his boss (the Governor) signed AB109 (aka Public Safety Realignment)  into law.  Realignment prohibits prison sentences for virtually all property felonies, parole violations and even crimes like assault.  The most severe sentence a car thief, commercial burglar, or wife beater can receive under Realignment is time in county jail, and guess what?  As the state's inmate population had gone down, county jails have been filled to overflowing forcing the early release of thousands of habitual felons every week.  It may also be news to Secretary Kernan that crime has increased virtually everywhere in California, and not just property crimes.  FBI numbers released in January showed an increase in violent crime of 12.9% in the state's 67 largest cities last year.  A more recent report released by California Police Chiefs found that last year violent crime increased by 15.4% in cities with populations of less than 100,000.   

When I discuss America's sky-high recidivism rate (49% for federal offenders and 77% for state offenders), I sometimes encounter the objection that not all criminals return to the crime for which they went to prison.  This is true.  Not infrequently, they branch out.  Hence today's story:

A Grand Rapids man released from prison last summer for a November 1998 murder pleaded guilty Tuesday to a federal cocaine trafficking charge following his arrest in Southeast Grand Rapids with more than a pound of cocaine.

Keith Vonta Hopskin appeared in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids where he admitted to having at least a pound of cocaine he planned to distribute....

Hopskin told police he had been receiving several ounces of cocaine about two times a month since July, court records show. He was released from prison July 5 on a second-degree murder conviction.

The 38-year-old, who has a prior federal drug conviction, told investigators he paid $10,500 for the cocaine and was able to sell three ounces before police stepped in.

The City Attorney for Los Angeles is Mike Feuer.  The office he holds is non-partisan, but Feuer himself is an active, liberal Democrat, and a leader, with Cyrus Vance of Manhattan, of a group of prosecutors opposing what they call "gun violence."

When California voters approved Proposition 47 in November 2014, it marked a new era of crime and punishment in the state.

It also led to a system that, so far, has utterly failed, City Attorney Mike Feuer told a Downtown Los Angeles audience yesterday.

In the effort to reduce the state prison population, Prop. 47 downgraded a half dozen non-violent felonies, such as certain kinds of drug possession and petty theft, to misdemeanors, meaning offenders receive shorter sentences.

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"Almost no one has gotten anything close to meaningful drug rehabilitation, and we've prosecuted thousands of these cases," Feuer said Monday at a luncheon at the Downtown Palm hosted by the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum. "The system is broken at every level."

I've been debating for years the question whether prison is criminogenic, i.e., whether imprisonment increases crime.  Doug Berman, among others, has consistently said that prison is indeed criminogenic; I take the opposite view.  I think the evidence is overwhelming that imprisonment decreases crime.

Whether punishment promotes or deters future criminal activity by the convicted offender is a key public policy concern. Longer prison sentences further isolate offenders from the legitimate labor force and may promote the formation of criminal networks in prison.  On the other hand, greater initial punishment may have a deterrence effect on the individual being punished, sometimes called "specific deterrence," through learning or the rehabilitative effect of prison.

We test the effect of prison sentence length on recidivism by exploiting a unique quasi-experimental design from adult sentences within a courthouse in Seattle, Washington.  Offenders who plead guilty are randomly assigned to a sentencing judge, which leads to random differences in prison sentence length depending on the sentencing judge's proclivities. We find that one-month extra prison sentence reduces the rate of recidivism by about one percentage point, with possibly larger effects for those with limited criminal histories. However, the reduction in recidivism comes almost entirely in the first year of release, which we interpret as consistent with prison's rehabilitative role.

We are endlessly lectured about how "alternatives to incarceration" will cost less, keep us just as safe, and improve rehabilitation.

More than 240 inmates have slipped away from federal custody in the past three years while traveling to halfway houses, including several who committed bank robberies and a carjacking while on the lam, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The current issue of the Journal of Law and Economics has this article by Rasmus Landersø.  Here is the abstract:

This paper studies how longer incarceration spells affect offenders' labor market outcomes by using a reform that increased incarceration lengths by approximately 1 month. I use detailed register data for offenders who predominantly serve incarceration spells of 1-2 months. I analyze the sample for several years prior to and after incarceration and show that the reform led to an exogenous increase in incarceration lengths. I find that the longer incarceration spells result in lower unemployment rates and higher earnings, possibly because marginal increases in short incarceration spells improve conditions and incentives for rehabilitation, while the costs of jail related to these outcomes are unaffected. I show that the estimates are robust to different econometric specifications and further provide evidence that my results are not driven by changes in macroeconomic conditions.

I am skeptical about how that would generalize to different conditions, but it's an interesting result.

We are often told that alternatives to prison will do as well to protect us, will cost less, and will mark a step forward in our humanity.  Leading the list of alternatives is more "investment" in rehabilitation.

...bear in mind Mr. Rehab himself, Jihadist-turned-poet (according to his gushing defense lawyer, Marc Falkoff), Ibrahim al-Rubaish.  As this story relates:

The United States government has put al Qaeda's Ibrahim al-Rubaish on a global terrorist list and offered a $5 million reward for information on his whereabouts. Once we knew his whereabouts -- Guantanamo Bay detention center. But in 2006, the U.S. released Rubaish to Saudi Arabia where he was to be "rehabilitated."

At the time, Rubaysh was a poster child for the terrorist detainee-sympathizing, anti-Gitmo crew. Marc Falkoff, a lawyer for detainees and editor of Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, included in his collection a poem by Rubaysh called "Ode to the Sea." In his introduction to the poetry collection Falkoff, described Rubaysh as follows:

Ibrahim al-Rubaish was teaching in Pakistan when he was arrested by mercenaries and sold to allied forces. A religious scholar who dislikes hostility and was once a candidate for a judgeship, Rubaish has a daughter, born just three months before he was captured, who is now five years old.

Lots of interesting stuff in the weekend Wall Street Journal today.  The nonsubscriber links provided should be good for seven days.  The article most clearly on-topic is by Devlin Barrett on private prison companies and rehabilitation.

Damon Hininger, chief executive of Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corp. of America, said in an interview that government clients are increasingly concerned about the long-term costs of housing inmates and are pushing CCA and other private operators to save them money by reducing recidivism, the number of inmates who are released only to do a repeat turn in prison.

He plans to expand the company's prison rehabilitation programs, drug counseling and its prisoner re-entry work in cities around the country. It's a significant shift for CCA, which has built a profitable business from incarcerating people--nearly 70,000 inmates are currently housed in more than 60 facilities. The company is the fifth-largest correction system in the country, after only the federal government and the states of California, Florida and Texas.

"This is a watershed moment for our company and we hope it will be for our entire industry,'' Mr. Hininger said. "We are determined to prove that we can play a leadership role in reducing recidivism and that we have every incentive to do so. The interests of government, taxpayers, shareholders, and communities are aligned. We all just need to recognize that and commit to that.''

My reaction to stories like this is "yes, but..."

Over most of the past decade liberal groups, which originally opposed and have for years sought to eliminate the so-called  "harsh" habitual criminal sentencing policies adopted in the 80s and 90s, have launched collaborative efforts with libertarians and some Republicans to encourage alternative sentencing.  "Right on Crime","Smart on Crime" and "Smart Sentencing" advocates have been successful at changing policies in many parts of the country to reduce sentences for criminals categorized as non-violent, and placing them instead in community programs to help them become law-abiding members of society, with the promise of saving millions in state and federal prison costs.  At a time when crime rates are relatively low, and our European betters and Hollywood movie stars are constantly scolding America as the incarceration nation, the allure of an America where bright, dedicated government employees guide minor offenders off the criminal path is difficult for many to resist. 

Dan Walters had this post, with the above title, on the Sacramento Bee's Capital Alert blog last Friday:

Gov. Jerry Brown's "realignment" of criminal justice procedures, aimed at reducing overcrowding in state prisons by diverting more felons into local jails and probation, has not resulted in lower rates of new criminal activity among offenders, a study by the Public Policy Institute of California concludes.

New offenses by those released from custody are known as "recidivism" and putting felons under local control was supposed to include more drug treatment and other programs to reduce their criminal activity.

However, the PPIC study concludes, "We find that the post-realignment period has not seen dramatic changes in arrests or convictions of released offenders. In the context of realignment's broad reforms to the corrections system, our findings suggest that offender behavior has not changed substantially."

"Overall arrest rates of released offenders are down slightly, with the proportion of those arrested within a year of release declining by two percentage points," the authors of the study, Magnus Lofstrom, Steven Raphael, and Ryken Grattet, continue. "At the same time, the proportion of those arrested multiple times has increased noticeably, by about seven percentage points. These higher multiple arrest rates may reflect the substantial increase in the time that released offenders spend on the streets--a result of counties' limited jail capacity."

The PPIC study may provide new ammunition for the critics of realignment who contend that the state is solving its prison overcrowding problem under pressure from federal judges but in doing so is putting new burdens on local governments, particularly county jails, that result in more criminal activity.