Pubdate: Sun, 27 Mar 2005
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Page: Front Page
Copyright: 2005 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Jenifer Warren, Times Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

STATE IS JOINING SHIFT ON PRISONS

As New Strategies Take Hold Around the Nation, the Governor Is Turning the 
Focus of California's Penal System to Helping Parolees Rejoin Society.

SACRAMENTO -- By insisting that California make rehabilitation a focus of 
prison life, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is joining a national movement of 
political leaders who believe it is time for a new approach to incarceration.

For almost three decades, politicians have belittled efforts to 
rehabilitate inmates as ineffective mollycoddling. Led by California, the 
nation undertook a prison building binge and adopted tough crime laws that 
pushed the population behind bars past 2 million.

Now, with states under persistent economic stress and evidence showing that 
most inmates are rearrested within three years of release, lawmakers across 
the country are acknowledging the need for change. There is now broad 
agreement that locking up and mostly ignoring offenders has been far from a 
cure-all for crime.

With bipartisan support, states small and large are shortening criminal 
sentences, restoring early release for good behavior, diverting drug 
offenders to treatment and beefing up efforts to help parolees rejoin society.

And in Congress, a Republican senator from Kansas soon will introduce the 
Second Chance Act, which would dedicate millions of federal dollars to 
helping ex-convicts find jobs, housing and treatment for mental illness and 
addiction.

"Even in stark economic terms, it's become very difficult to argue that our 
investment in prisons is delivering a great result," said Michael Jacobson, 
who ran New York City's jails and probation system in the 1990s and wrote a 
just-released book on incarceration. "So I think we're at a historic moment 
when ... conditions are ripe for dramatic reform."

Many states already are well on their way, pursuing new approaches that, 
while unproven by hard data, are showing promise and thinning out prison 
populations after decades of steady growth.

The changes generating the most excitement come under a new label -- reentry.

Unlike rehabilitation, reentry reflects a reality about corrections that 
often escapes public notice: About 95% of all offenders -- about 600,000 
people a year nationwide -- will be going home.

Reginald Wilkinson, chief of Ohio's prison system, said helping felons move 
from the cell to the neighborhood was simply good public safety: "I often 
ask the question, 'Who would you rather sit next to on a bus? A person who 
is very, very angry about their prison experience and untrained and 
uneducated? Or a person who obtained a GED and vocational training in 
prison and is on his or her way to work?"

In embracing new strategies, California -- once seen as a trendsetter in 
correctional standards and practices -- lags far behind the pack.

The state's prisons are bulging with thousands more bodies than they were 
built to hold, a population that soared by more than 500% from 1980 to 
2000. And its recidivism rate -- 60%, according to corrections officials -- 
is the highest in the nation.

That said, experts believe that whatever path California chooses, its sheer 
size as the largest state prison system -- with 163,000 inmates, 32 
penitentiaries and 50,000 employees -- means it will have a hefty effect on 
national trends.

Until recently, legislators and governors showed little interest in 
charting a new course for the Golden State. The costs of that choice -- in 
dollars and in the churning of Californians in and out of prison each year 
- -- are demanding attention now. With other public programs starved for 
scarce state money, the $6.5-billion correctional system is the object of 
intense scrutiny.

Governor Vows Reforms

Schwarzenegger, unafraid of being dubbed soft on crime, has made his 
desires clear. Declaring the state's penal system a shameful mess, he has 
vowed that on his watch, prisons will do more than temporarily isolate 
felons from the rest of the population.

The Republican governor has put new people in charge and directed them to 
scour the land for successful rehabilitation programs that could work in 
California. He also has asked the Legislature to approve a top-to-bottom 
reorganization of the correctional system that lifts rehabilitation to 
equal standing with the nuts and bolts of running prisons -- a major 
departure from the recent past.

Details are sketchy, and funds are even scarcer. Moreover, one of the few 
initiatives that Schwarzenegger already has launched -- the diversion of 
nonviolent parole violators into community-based programs instead of prison 
- -- has faltered.

"We're playing catch-up," said Joan Petersilia, a UC Irvine criminologist 
advising the Schwarzenegger team on corrections. "We're trying to put 
Humpty Dumpty back together again, and we have such a broken system that we 
have a long ways to go."

The revival of rehabilitation nationally -- and its bipartisan support -- 
is remarkable considering the drubbing the concept took for so many years. 
That began in the 1960s and '70s, when the public's long-held belief that 
criminals were sick and could be healed behind bars gave way to new 
thinking. In part, the shift was a matter of timing. There was unrest in 
the nation's cities, a rise of violent crime and drug addiction in the 
streets. Inside prisons, disturbances -- including riots and murders at 
California lockups -- erupted.

In the midst of such turmoil, a researcher for the New York Legislature 
named Robert Martinson published a national survey of rehabilitation 
programs. His 1974 work, legendary in criminology, essentially dismissed 
such programs as ineffective.

Though widely maligned by scholars, Martinson's article -- which received 
attention in such high-profile venues as CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" -- fit 
perfectly with the zeitgeist, pouring intellectual fuel on a fire that 
already was raging.

Soon, the politics of crime were in full flame. Gradually, the notion that 
prisons should fix people so that they wouldn't commit more crimes was 
replaced by a firm belief that prisons should be about incapacitation and 
deterrence.

"Martinson's message met a convenient and receptive audience," Petersilia 
said. "His conclusion that nothing works became the mantra for people who 
wanted to cut programs and get tough."

That, to varying degrees, is what happened in the decades that followed. 
And in making the shift, California was at the forefront, with tough 
policies embraced by politicians from both parties.

Perhaps most significant was the state's turn in 1977 to a new sentencing 
scheme that set fixed terms for most crimes. Previously, most criminals 
received open-ended sentences and had to earn release from a parole board 
that judged whether they had improved themselves and had a plan for life on 
the outside.

But that approach -- in place for almost 60 years -- displeased people 
across the political spectrum. Prisoners and liberals said the parole 
boards' decisions were arbitrary, influenced by politics and race. 
Conservatives said economics often pressured parole boards to release 
inmates prematurely to save money. Scholars said there was no conclusive 
proof that inmates left prison rehabilitated.

Sentencing Overhauled

Their unusual alliance abolished the system and brought in the determinate 
sentencing that California has today. The law, signed by former Gov. Jerry 
Brown, changed the language of the penal code. Overnight, the new purpose 
of incarceration was declared, unequivocally, to be punishment. 
Rehabilitation became incidental, not central, to an inmate's prison stay.

There were many unintended consequences, but one change quickly became 
visible: Criminal justice, especially punishment, was suddenly an issue 
ripe for political entrepreneurs.

"Before the ink was even dry, there was this feeding frenzy in the 
Legislature as people tried to ratchet up the penalties for crime," said 
Barry Krisberg, president of the Oakland-based National Council on Crime 
and Delinquency.

The change "opened up this vast area of real estate that has been actively 
worked by politicians ever since," said Jonathan Simon, a professor of law 
at UC Berkeley.

One peak event was passage of the "three strikes and you're out" laws in 
California and elsewhere. Such measures, coupled with tougher sentences for 
drug crimes and other offenses, propelled prison populations ever upward 
across the land.

In the 1990s, however, many states fell into economic distress, prompting 
their leaders to question whether they could afford prison systems that 
gobbled such a huge proportion of tax dollars. Nationwide, taxpayers spent 
about $9 billion on corrections in 1982. By 2002, that figure was almost 
$60 billion.

At the same time, violent crime has continued a steady decline, and polls 
now show a dramatic softening in public concern about the issue. In the 
last presidential election, crime -- for decades a defining theme for many 
politicians of both parties -- was not even on the agenda.

Against that backdrop, most states have begun tweaking their criminal 
justice systems to achieve savings -- and better results. Many have altered 
their approach to drug offenders, sending them to treatment instead of 
expensive prison beds. Michigan made the biggest splash in late 2002 when 
the outgoing GOP governor, John Engler, repealed the toughest mandatory 
minimum drug sentences in the nation.

Other states have made certain categories of inmates eligible for parole 
earlier or have increased the amount of "good time" credits they can earn 
to cut their time behind bars.

Ohio passed a law that slapped tougher penalties on violent offenders but 
ensured that many nonviolent felons -- from thieves to check forgers -- 
faced fines or a stayed in halfway houses rather than prison cells. In the 
wake of that and other changes, Ohio's inmate population has dropped by 
6,000 -- to about 43,000 -- and the state has closed two prisons.

The changes drawing the most attention, however, focus on helping convicts 
move more successfully from prison into the free world. Criminologists say 
it is crucial that states do more during that fragile time when convicts 
walk out the prison gate and attempt to live lawfully among the rest of 
society.

Until recently, few states made much of an investment in that transition. 
California, for instance, historically has given departing felons $200 -- 
minus the cost of a bus ticket -- and told them to make an appointment with 
their parole officer. A few weeks before release, some were offered a 
voluntary program with tips on where to look for housing and apply for a 
driver's license. But that was available at only a fraction of the state's 
prisons.

Ohio's effort was little better, said Wilkinson, who took over leadership 
of that state's prisons in 1991. But now, reentry in Ohio "begins the day 
the offender arrives" in the system. After diagnosing incoming inmates, 
officials require convicts to use prison time to acquire job skills and to 
receive drug treatment and other help.

Family Ties Emphasized

Officials also push them to maintain strong bonds with their families -- a 
key ingredient to success. As they exit, many convicts are placed in 
halfway houses while others visit "citizen circles" that use community 
members to help parolees with housing, employment, counseling and other needs.

Political support for the changes in Ohio has been bipartisan and 
unanimous, Wilkinson said, because "people realize this is really about 
public safety."

In Washington, the conservative Republican senator who is author of the 
Second Chance Act agrees.

"Recidivism rates are now higher than ever," said Sen. Sam Brownback of 
Kansas, who is joining forces with Democrats such as Sen. Joe Biden of 
Delaware in pushing the legislation. "It's time to take a different 
approach to make real and effective changes in the system -- to offer 
prisoners a chance to become part of society in a positive way."

Unclear so far is how well the new rehabilitative approaches will work. 
Wilkinson and others concede that it is too early for any solid, empirical 
measurements but say anecdotal reports are promising.

Some observers, however, are sounding a cautionary note. UCLA research 
psychologist David Farabee, in a new book, says the effectiveness of 
prisoner programs -- from education to vocational training -- has been 
"tremendously overstated."

"I'm for doing anything -- I don't care if it's yoga or Jazzercise -- if we 
do a rigorous study and find it's effective," Farabee said. "What I fear is 
that with a new big pendulum swing, we'll return to the programs of the 
past, thinking we're doing something new and progressive, when the programs 
aren't any better than they were 30 years ago."

Supporters of the rehabilitation revival agree that hard evidence of what 
works is lacking. They also say that when it comes to helping inmates turn 
around their lives, there is no silver bullet, and that what works for one 
might not work for the next.

"We are in a bit of a guessing game at this point," said Dan Wilhelm of the 
Vera Institute of Justice in New York, a nonprofit think tank that advises 
states on correctional policy. "But it would be hard to do much worse than 
what the current system produces.

"If General Motors had a division that reported that sort of results," he 
said, "there's a good chance they wouldn't be in business for long." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake