prisoner reentry
Why We Need Criminal Justice 2.0
Published September 07, 2009 @ 08:57AM PT
All sorts of technologies are making life and work easier and more transparent. Criminal justice agencies and organizations have an opportunity to make broad use of interactive tools on the web to ensure public safety and educate the public about issues and programs.
Some time ago, I came across this astounding video demonstrating the Sixth Sense, an amazing new tech tool being pioneered at the MIT Media Lab. (Watch the video after the jump).
I was blown away. This video made me realize that there were people creating cutting-edge technologies that I had never even conceived possible. Since I write a blog for the Upper Manhattan Reentry Task Force, I immediately began wondering how this technology might be useful for people in the process of return from prison to community.
A Gimmick or a Good Thing? Philly DA Hopeful Dons an Ankle Bracelet
Published September 04, 2009 @ 03:05PM PT
The map above shows the exact location of Philadelphia's Republican DA candidate Michael Untermeyer when I visited his site a few hours ago. He strapped on an ankle bracelet on Wednesday and he'll wear it for 30 days in a gimmicky attempt to bring attention to an important issue: the over-incarceration of Philadelphia residents.
Untermeyer's point is that the city could take advantage of electronic monitoring in order to offer parole to thousands of non-violent offenders, relieving prison overcrowding and giving people convicted of crimes a second chance. And he's right.
The financial argument for monitoring is a strong one, as the city spends $97 a day keeping someone in prison, compared to less than eight bucks for a day of monitoring. The societal gains of expanded monitoring and decreased incarceration are far greater - people awaiting trial don't have to lose their jobs, their families don't lose support, they can continue being a parent. The list goes on.
Untermeyer's opponent, Seth Williams, called the move a gimmick. I agree, that's what it is. But good political campaigns have good gimmicks. Calling attention to over-incarceration can only be a bad thing if Untermeyer is elected and then conveniently forgets to take on this issue.
Gimmick or not, both Williams and Untermeyer are talking about alternatives to incarceration, and that's a refreshing thing in a DA race, another sign that the times are a-changin.
Sharing Reentry Resources Online
Published August 28, 2009 @ 05:54AM PT
The law is a paper-based industry. Or at least it always has been. Judges like paper. They like notarized paper even more.
This is why I was so glad to learn recently that reentry advocates in (at least) two states have gone to the effort to create wikis cataloging the resources and agencies that provide services to prisoners reentering society after time behind bars. These reentry wikis have the potential to connect parolees, their families, service providers and many others to help these systems work much more smoothly than the siloed, bureaucratic, paper-weighted backwaters they have traditionally been.
The two I've seen are in Michigan and Oregon, but there could be more.
Life Without Parole Is Not The Answer
Published August 25, 2009 @ 05:45PM PT
Human Trafficking blogger Amanda Kloer has the story today of Sara Kruzan, who was sentenced to life without parole ten years ago in California for killing her abusive pimp when she was 16. She was forced to work as a child prostitute for three years, and she finally retaliated, killing the man who had controlled her and raped her regularly since she was 13.
Her case is a clear example of our horribly misguided (and overused) life without parole sentences for juveniles. Not only was she young and abused when she was sentenced to LWOP, but she killed a man who abused her for years – possibly making it a case of battered person syndrome.
Both her age at the time of the crime and the suffering she had endured should have qualified her for a more reasonable sentence.
And like many people in prison – and especially those sent away as kids – she has changed behind bars and feels that spending the rest of life locked up would be a terrible waste.
“I have a lot of good to offer,” she says in a heartbreaking video interview from prison (watch it after the jump). “The person who I am today at 29, I could set a positive example. I’m very determined to show that no matter what you’ve done, or where you’ve come from, or what you’ve experienced in life, it’s up to you to change,”
Smart on Crime: More Safety at Less Cost
Published August 14, 2009 @ 05:59AM PT
[Editor's Note: Kamala Harris is currently the District Attorney of San Francisco, the first woman to be elected to the office in the city. She is a candidate for Attorney General of California in 2010, and we're excited to have her guest blog about an innovative approach she has taken to addressing a chronic problem in San Francisco, which impacts all of California: prisoner re-entry.]
When the California State Legislature reconvenes Monday, dealing with the corrections crisis will no doubt be on the top of everyone's "to do" list. The Governor signed a budget requiring a $1.2 billion reduction in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget, and a panel of three federal judges recently ordered a cap on the state prison population that could result in the release of more than 40,000 inmates. If ever there was a time to think outside the box and break with the approaches of the past, the time is now. We have to do something different.
Over the last thirty years, California's prison population has soared. In 1980, California had a prison population of about 24,000 in a state of 24 million. Today we have an inmate population of 172,000 out of 36 million people. This means that since 1980, our population has grown by 50% while our prison population has grown 617%.
Today, the majority of those inmates are not first-time offenders. Each year, approximately 70 percent of those released from California prisons commit another offense, resulting in the highest recidivism rate in the nation. These repeat offenses are preventable crimes that claim more victims and harm communities' quality of life. It costs on average more than $10,000 to prosecute just one felony case, and about $47,000 per year to house each inmate in prison. Every time an inmate is released and commits a new crime, local and state jurisdictions pay those costs over and over again. Most importantly, individuals and communities pay the highest price when they are re-victimized by crime. To keep our communities safe and use public money wisely, we must insist that people coming out of the criminal justice system become productive citizens and stay out.
In San Francisco, I have developed a smart on crime approach: we must be tough on serious and violent offenders while we get just as tough on the root causes of crime. In my office, we have raised felony conviction rates and sent more violent offenders to state prison, at the same time we have launched innovative, cost effective approaches to reduce recidivism and break the cycles of crime.
Revisiting Three-Strikes Laws
Published August 11, 2009 @ 04:14PM PT
The pendulum is swinging on mass incarceration, and the notorious and ineffective three-strikes laws could fall across the country in the months and years ahead. States are broke, and they're looking at their corrections budgets (see the absurd spending numbers in yesterday's post) and realizing that locking people up for life for smoking crack might not have been the best idea.
Prosecutors in Washington State are bringing clemency petitions for people who served a decade or more under three-strikes laws and have never committed a violent crime. At least 100 people were sentenced to life without parole in the 1990s in Washington for three nonviolent crimes.
The L.A. Times reports today on the unusual steps being taken by Washington prosecutors, and highlights the case of Stevan Dozier (above), who was the first non-violent lifer in the nation granted clemency when he was freed in May.Today, Dozier is married and works at a Seattle nonprofit.
Twenty-four states still have three-strikes laws, despite a move toward judicial discretion over the last decade. These laws are applied more cautiously now than they were during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, but they need to be fully erased to guarantee that defendants are sentenced based on their crime and not outdated legislation.
A Family on Parole
Published August 08, 2009 @ 05:14AM PT
Photographer Joseph Rodriguez, who has told moving stories through his photos from East L.A. to Kurdistan, turned to multimedia production in 2007 to address the over-incarceration in our population by documenting the lives of former prisoners returning to society. In one of his photo/audio pieces (above and here), Darlene Escalante talks about growing up with both parents in prison, serving time in prison with her mother, and being paroled as a family. It's well worth the six minutes.
Rodriguez recently told Miki Johnson how he came to take on this project:
Last year the Pew Research Center did a study called “One out of a hundred people in prison.” That was kind of the spark to seriously revisit this story and see what I could do about telling it in a different way. I did not want to repeat myself, and I didn’t want to repeat what other photographers have already done with work inside prisons. I wanted to challenge that story somewhat, because I think when you come out of prison, you’re still doing time in many different respects. You may be on parole, you may be an addict, you may have problems getting employment, and you can’t vote — all those different issues that affect many ex-offenders.
