Recently in Rehabilitation Category

In the 1960s, America made a terrible mistake.  We believed too easily in experts who supposedly had the answers for corrections.  They knew how to "fix" criminals who were, after all, sick and not evil.  When the fixes were actually subjected to scientific scrutiny to determine which of them worked, the stunning answer was that none of them did.  In the meantime, lax sentencing contributed to the horrific rise in crime, a rise that was brought back down only after we got tough.

Fast-forward 50 years, and those who do not remember this history are working to condemn the nation to repeat it, over the vehement objection of those who do remember.  One of the programs touted to rehabilitate criminals so we won't need to lock so many up is halfway houses.  Or maybe not.  Sam Dolnick has this story in the NYT:

The federal government and states across the country have spent billions of dollars in recent years on sprawling, privately run halfway houses, which are supposed to save money and rehabilitate inmates more effectively than prisons do.

But now, a groundbreaking study by officials in Pennsylvania is casting serious doubt on the halfway-house model, concluding that inmates who spent time in these facilities were more likely to return to crime than inmates who were released directly to the street.

The findings startled the administration of Gov. Tom Corbett, which responded last month by drastically overhauling state contracts with the companies that run the 38 private halfway houses in Pennsylvania. The system costs more than $110 million annually.

Pennsylvania's corrections secretary, John E. Wetzel, who oversaw the study, called the system "an abject failure."

Thanks to Michael Santella for the link.

Dana Nichols has this article on realignment in Calaveras County, California (locale of Mark Twain's first published piece of fiction).

The agencies charged with enforcing laws and supervising criminal offenders in Calaveras County aren't getting along with each other and are bungling key tasks required under California's 2011 criminal justice realignment, according to a county grand jury report.

Along with shifting a lot of incarcerated felons from state prison to county jail, the realignment bill also shifted the supervision of a lot of released felons from the state parole system to county probation offices.  Over the years, probation officers have developed a different culture from parole officers.  I'm sure this is due in large part to the differences in the criminal populations they have supervised.  The people supervised by probation officers in the past were, by definition, those that the judge thought were suitable for probation, largely based on the judge's assessment of their potential for rehabilitation.  Those who ended up being supervised by parole officers tended to be the hardened criminals.  Probation officers therefore tended to develop more of a rehabilitation viewpoint, while parole officers tended toward a viewpoint that their job was to protect the public from this still-dangerous criminal.

If Lindsay Lohan didn't exist as an emblem of the unseriousness of criminal law in California, I'd have to invent her.  I mean, willy-nilly releasing criminals under what is, with intentional obscurity, called "realignment," is one thing, but Ms. Rehab is something else.

Lindsay Lohan agreed to spend 90 days in a "locked in" drug rehab facility as part of a plea deal to settle criminal charges against her Monday.

The actress entered pleas of no contest on two misdemeanor charges relating to a traffic accident last summer, and she did not challenge the finding that she violated her shoplifting probation with those convictions.

She's spent 250 days in five rehab facilities since January 2007, including one long court-ordered stint after a failed drug test.

The actress has appeared in court at least 20 times before four Los Angeles judges who have now found her in violation of probation six times and sentenced her to a total of nine months in jail.

Lohan has spent about two weeks behind bars in six trips to the Los Angeles County jail, served 35 days under house arrest and worked about 67 days of community service at the county morgue.

Prof. Cecilia Klingele of Wisconsin Law School responded to my critical assessment of her SSRN piece (an assessment I discussed in my earlier entry) with this comment on Sentencing Law and Policy:

A small clarification. The paper does not suggest that community supervision (or any lesser sentence) should replace prison in cases where it is warranted for just punishment or public safety. The paper discusses the proper (and improper) use of community supervision in typical cases involving people whose crimes are minor, whose culpability is low, and/or whose threat to public safety is minimal; and for those who have served their sentences and are transitioning back to their communities. When community supervision is used, of course it should be thoughtful, well-resourced, and carefully executed. My point is that it is often used in ways and for people who would be better punished in differently, be it through jail time, fines, or unconditional discharge. If anything in the paper misleads on that point (or any other), I welcome suggestions for revision and clarification.

Hat tip to Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy for pulling the curtain back on the actual agenda of the "incarceration nation" crowd.  This is the group, generally flourishing in academia, the media and (of course) the defense bar, that has been telling us for years that prison is vastly overused in this country, and that we would be just as safe, not to mention more frugal and more humane, to use community supervision instead.  In order to sell this idea, these folks have assured us that community supervision would consist of stringent and carefully monitored oversight of offenders.

To decrease the overuse of imprisonment, sentencing and correctional practices should therefore limit, rather than expand, the use of community supervision in three important ways.

First, terms of community supervision should be imposed in fewer cases, with alternatives ranging from fines to unconditional discharge to short jail terms imposed instead. Second, conditions of probation and post-release supervision should be imposed sparingly, and only when they directly correspond to a risk of re-offense. Finally, terms of community supervision should be limited in duration, extending only long enough to facilitate a period of structured re-integration after sentencing or following a term of incarceration.

Now here is an interesting idea.  The Big Apple government has this press release.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda I. Gibbs and Correction Commissioner Dora B. Schriro today announced that the City will award a contract for the nation's first Social Impact Bond, an innovative way to fund promising new programs at no cost to taxpayers. As part of the Young Men's Initiative, this investment will support a new evidence-based program for young adults on Rikers Island. The program - the Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience (ABLE) - focuses on personal responsibility education, training and counseling, with the goal of reducing the likelihood of reincarceration. In this new model, private investors fund the intervention through a nonprofit contractor and the government pays the contractor only if the program meets its goals. Goldman Sachs will provide financing, Bloomberg Philanthropies will provide grant support for the effort and MDRC, a leading non-profit, will oversee project implementation.

*                                   *                                 *

An independent evaluation, conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice, will assess the rates of reincarceration and determine the program's effectiveness over time. If the program does not meet its targets for reducing reincarceration, the City pays nothing. For Goldman Sachs to break even on its original investment, the program will need to reduce reincarceration by 10%.

I am deeply skeptical of the claims of "evidence-based" rehabilitation practices, because I know how easy it is for interested parties to produce "evidence" that is complete hogwash.  I also know how the amount of scrutiny that any research receives is strongly influenced by its Political Correctness quotient:  intense and hostile for research with conservative implications and vastly more lax for research with liberal implications.  But if Goldman Sachs' own money is on the line, they will surely examine the evidence of program effectiveness meticulously, and PC quotient be damned.

One flaw I see here is having the Vera Institute do the results evaluation.  That organization has a strong ideological interest in seeing rehabilitation programs declared "effective." A less interested evaluator would have been a better choice.

One of the most persistent errors of people who set out to reform criminal law is the idea that the people who have committed the most horrible crimes are just like us down deep.  The Quakers created the "penitentiary" way back in the late eighteenth century believing that criminals, if confined, would be penitent and reflect deeply and remorsefully on what they had done.  After all, that is what the good Quakers would do if they had deeply sinned.

Well, they aren't like us, and they don't reflect deeply and repent.  John Christoffersen has this story for AP from Connecticut:

The Connecticut killer who once called himself one of the most hated men in America said in a death row interview that he tries not to think about the murder of a suburban mother and her two daughters, suffers no nightmares and has nothing to say to the only survivor of the brutal 2007 attack.

Joshua Komisarjevsky told The Associated Press in his first interview since he was convicted that there isn't anything he could say to Dr. William Petit "that will restore the lives lost."

He also declined an opportunity to express remorse for the killings.

"I guess my reaction is not the reaction society expected," Komisarjevsky said.

It's exactly the reaction I expected.

Say you have an opening in your accounting department.  Wouldn't you like to know if an applicant is a convicted embezzler?  The government just might want to prevent you from learning that, under the banner of "disparate impact."  The WSJ has this editorial:

The Obama Administration's favorite antidiscrimination tool is "disparate impact," which relies on statistics to allege racial prejudice, regardless of intent. The Justice Department is using it to lean on banks to lend to more minorities, and now we hear the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wants to use it to wield more power over business hiring.

Several sources tell us the Commission is working on policy guidance that would significantly limit companies' use of credit and criminal histories in hiring under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A Commission spokeswoman declined to comment by email, "citing Agency practice barring public discussion of any policy that may or may not be in development."

Employment of people with criminal histories is an important issue in rehabilitation, and we don't want to choke off opportunity entirely.  After all, if the person really does want to go straight, employment is a big part of that effort.  Even so, for some jobs we do not anyone with certain kinds of histories.  We don't want embezzlers in accounting.  We don't want child molesters in day care.

Can the present Administration be trusted to give employers the necessary leeway?  I see no reason to be confident of that.

The title of this post is the title of a piece in NRO about Chuck Colson, one-time Nixon hatchet man.  Colson went to prison for his part in the Watergate scandal, and is probably best known now for starting Prison Fellowship, a group that purports to help rehabilitate inmates through Bible study.

has been debased in our Tilt-a-Whirl media culture that can't distinguish between notoriety and fame. In contemporary America, redemption begins sometime between the first check-in into rehab and the first cable-TV interview, and reaches completion when everyone gets distracted by someone else's attention-grabbing disgrace.

Colson left government after Nixon's reelection, feeling exhausted and empty. As the furor over Watergate grew, he visited a friend one night, a successful businessman who had converted to Christianity. The friend read a passage from C. S. Lewis: "Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God." Later, Colson sat in his car outside the house weeping alone in the darkness, not tears of sadness nor of joy, but "of relief."

When he realized that the exigencies of his legal defense were inconsistent with the forthrightness entailed by his new faith, he pleaded guilty and became Prisoner 23226 at Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Alabama.

It's one of the routine conceits of the liberal/professorial view of the world that criminal law hardliners are a bunch of cowboys/dopes/wahoos, while legal academia is laced with nuance, reflection and cool reason.  If there's even a trace of embarrassment about, or even recognition of, this wonderfully self-flattering portrait, I have yet to detect it.

One of the mechanisms for polishing such a cozy view of professional life is the publication of articles in this journal or that, any number of which show up in SSRN.  Publication creates the aura of scholarship  --  an aura especially easy to maintain when those who do the "reviewing" share an identical, We Know Better view of the criminal justice system.

The resulting hothouse of liberal platitudes occasionally produces something so palpably absurd, however, as to become an unconscious self-parody.  It happened today on Sentencing Law and Policy, which featured a gem titled, "Judge orders felons to write 5-page essays." 

 

From Ms. Rehab herself, Ms. Lindsay Lohan:  "I'm gonna do what I'm told to do."

Don't believe me?  Hey, it's on tape.

I know, I know.  The Lohan story is a cheap trick at this point.  On the other hand, so is rehab, so why not just laugh at the joke?

The "smart on crime" folks want us to believe that the experts know how to fix criminals, despite the disastrous consequences of our falling for that line in the 1960s.  This is not just in the United States.  Martin Bentham reports for the London Evening Standard:

A flagship Met police scheme to cut crime among convicts freed from jail has had no impact on the reoffending rate, an official study revealed today.

The £11 million "Diamond Initiative" was set up to rehabilitate serial offenders by offering them help with problems such as drug and alcohol misuse, housing, debt and unemployment after their release.

Scotland Yard chiefs hoped that the scheme, which focused on criminals freed after sentences of 12 months or less, would lead to a significant drop in reoffending and help to deliver the "rehabilitation revolution" wanted by Justice Secretary Ken Clarke.

An official analysis of the project has found, however, that 42.4 per cent of participants committed new crimes within a year of leaving jail - almost identical to the 41.6 per cent reoffending rate among a similar group of convicts who received no special help after being freed.

We have no objection to trying out programs on a limited scale and subjecting them to rigorous testing to see what, if anything, "works."  But until there is proof, not just "evidence," we should not abandon the tough sentencing practices that helped produce the dramatic drop in crime rates in the 1990s, and we should not return to the blind faith in the "experts" that produced disastrous results in the past.