Loren Herzog, whose impending parole after a conviction and a sentence for multiple murders led a California lawmaker to ask for Governor Schwarzenegger's intervention, will be experiencing a rather unique parole experience. The Chron reports that, according to CDCR,
when Herzog is released, he will be kept on the state property belonging to the Susanville prison, but outside of the perimeter of the facility.
I wonder what might explain this peculiar arrangement, and if any of our readers can enlighten us, all the better. Does Herzog not have a place to live? Or, is his release on parole halfhearted because of the extent and heinousness of his crimes? Is this an arrangement made specifically for Herzog, or is this the beginning of a "half parole" netherland for other defendants, too?
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Kelso: Sever Prison Health Care from CDCR
Yesterday's Sac Bee featured, in their Viewpoints section, a short piece by Clark Kelso, the federal receiver for the prison medical system. He begins by reporting their success--true to humonetarian principles, starting with savings:
We began the year anticipating our expenditures would be $2.146 billion. During the year, we implemented substantial changes to improve quality of care while simultaneously reducing unnecessary costs. The result? A reduction of $408 million in our expenditures. That is almost a 20 percent reduction and just over 80 percent of what I had forecast 18 months ago. My executive team and staff in the 33 institutions deserve the credit for this success.
However, Kelso also reports the improvement in quality of care:
The 2009 report of inmate deaths shows continued improvement. We have reduced the number of medical lapses by 16 percent, reduced the number of possibly preventable deaths by 26 percent and reduced the number of likely preventable deaths by 83 percent. There are other performance measures that I will be releasing soon. Those measures will reinforce that we are maintaining and improving the quality of care, although much work remains to be done.
Kelso plans a series of pieces on future improvements, the first of which, and most important in his view, is severing health care from CDCR:
The corrections department's mission is not health care. It is maintaining custody and control. The reason we have made so much progress on medical care in the past three years is because we have operated independently of CDCR and that independence let us focus on our health care mission. If responsibility for prison health care returns to the department of corrections after the conclusion of the receivership, the most likely result will be backsliding as the health care mission once again becomes subordinate to custody and control. This is not intended as a criticism of the department of corrections and its executive team or staff. It simply reflects the reality of organizational behavior and culture.
Whether or not one agrees with Kelso, or believes the improvements made to the health system were substantial (Julie Small's report on this matter showed mixed results), he comes off as thoughtful and genuinely passionate about improving prison health care. Moreover, the transparency of data from the receivership is astounding, especially in light of the difficulty of obtaining similar data from correctional sources. What do our readers think--should health services be completely independent of CDCR control?
We began the year anticipating our expenditures would be $2.146 billion. During the year, we implemented substantial changes to improve quality of care while simultaneously reducing unnecessary costs. The result? A reduction of $408 million in our expenditures. That is almost a 20 percent reduction and just over 80 percent of what I had forecast 18 months ago. My executive team and staff in the 33 institutions deserve the credit for this success.
However, Kelso also reports the improvement in quality of care:
The 2009 report of inmate deaths shows continued improvement. We have reduced the number of medical lapses by 16 percent, reduced the number of possibly preventable deaths by 26 percent and reduced the number of likely preventable deaths by 83 percent. There are other performance measures that I will be releasing soon. Those measures will reinforce that we are maintaining and improving the quality of care, although much work remains to be done.
Kelso plans a series of pieces on future improvements, the first of which, and most important in his view, is severing health care from CDCR:
The corrections department's mission is not health care. It is maintaining custody and control. The reason we have made so much progress on medical care in the past three years is because we have operated independently of CDCR and that independence let us focus on our health care mission. If responsibility for prison health care returns to the department of corrections after the conclusion of the receivership, the most likely result will be backsliding as the health care mission once again becomes subordinate to custody and control. This is not intended as a criticism of the department of corrections and its executive team or staff. It simply reflects the reality of organizational behavior and culture.
Whether or not one agrees with Kelso, or believes the improvements made to the health system were substantial (Julie Small's report on this matter showed mixed results), he comes off as thoughtful and genuinely passionate about improving prison health care. Moreover, the transparency of data from the receivership is astounding, especially in light of the difficulty of obtaining similar data from correctional sources. What do our readers think--should health services be completely independent of CDCR control?
Monday, September 13, 2010
The Unbearable Lightness of Tasing
Avid followers of the Mehserle trial for the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station may recall that his defense consisted of a mistake: Mehserle argued -- and the jury believed him -- that he had intended to use his taser, not his gun, on Grant. This defense argument places an emphasis on the taser as an instrument aimed to minimize the usage of more harmful force. However, we may ask ourselves whether adding this option to the array of devices available hasn't simply escalated law enforcement's response to violations and disorder, without diminishing the number of cases in which guns are used.
The latest installment with regard to these "lesser" devices comes from an NPR story about the usage of zapping devices at the Pitchess Detention Center north of Los Angeles.
"I don't care if you're the meanest, toughest person in the world," he says, "this will get your attention and make your brain focus on making it stop, rather than doing whatever you were planning on doing."
Riots are nothing new at this jail. The Pitchess Detention Center has a history of bloody inmate violence. In fact, the latest brawl between 200 inmates broke out two days after the Raytheon device was unveiled.
Dave Judge, the operation deputy for the sheriff's department, says the machine is more effective than their usual methods of firing rubber bullets and tear gas grenades.
"This is tame; this is mild," Judge says." This is a great way to intervene without causing any harm. The nice thing about this is it allows you to intervene at a distance."
With the remote-controlled device, he says, guards can focus on specific targets using a monitor and a joystick.
Whenever new techniques for order maintenance are introduced, the question is whether they might substitute the usage of lethal or otherwise harmful force, or substitute the usage of lesser options. If this is to be empirically assessed, what we need is to examine a number of incidents and count the frequency in which guns, tasers, and less intrusive techniques were used. Calculating the percentages would not be a perfect measure, because each riot and situation is somewhat different; but it would provide us with some measure as to whether the introduction of tasers is ameliorating, or exacerbating, the use of force in the detention context.
-------------
Props to Colin Wood for alerting me to the story.
Religious Freedom: Is a Courthouse Holding Cell a "Pretrial Detention Facility"?
While this is not a correctional issue per se, it raises interesting questions. Today's Chron reports:
A panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2-1 in May that Orange County deputies hadn't violated Souhair Khatib's rights by making her take off the religiously mandated headscarf for security reasons when she was placed in the holding cell.
But the court said Monday that a majority of its 27 judges had voted to set that ruling aside and refer the case to an 11-judge panel for a rehearing in December.
The dispute affects thousands of inmates throughout the nine-state circuit who are taken to holding cells before being brought to court, said Khatib's lawyer, Becki Kieffer. She said it was the first such case to reach a federal appeals court.
Kieffer argued that the majority in the three-judge panel's ruling had misinterpreted a federal law that broadly protects inmates' religious freedoms.
The law prohibits government agencies from imposing a "substantial burden" on the right to practice one's religion in a prison, jail or pretrial detention facility. The issue in the case is whether a courthouse holding cell, where inmates are held up to 12 hours before hearings, is a pretrial detention facility.
A panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2-1 in May that Orange County deputies hadn't violated Souhair Khatib's rights by making her take off the religiously mandated headscarf for security reasons when she was placed in the holding cell.
But the court said Monday that a majority of its 27 judges had voted to set that ruling aside and refer the case to an 11-judge panel for a rehearing in December.
The dispute affects thousands of inmates throughout the nine-state circuit who are taken to holding cells before being brought to court, said Khatib's lawyer, Becki Kieffer. She said it was the first such case to reach a federal appeals court.
Kieffer argued that the majority in the three-judge panel's ruling had misinterpreted a federal law that broadly protects inmates' religious freedoms.
The law prohibits government agencies from imposing a "substantial burden" on the right to practice one's religion in a prison, jail or pretrial detention facility. The issue in the case is whether a courthouse holding cell, where inmates are held up to 12 hours before hearings, is a pretrial detention facility.
9th Circuit: State Responsible for Disabled Inmate Conditions in Jails
Is the state of CA responsible for meeting disabled inmate needs in local jails? The official state position has been to take responsibility only for accommodations in state prisons. However, the Ninth Circuit has expanded this responsibility, and allowed lawyers for disabled inmates to provide evidence of violations in a hearing to be held at a later date. The Chron reports:
The lawsuit dates to 1994 and resulted in a court-approved plan in 2001 to accommodate the needs of disabled inmates in state prisons. Tuesday's ruling applies to inmates who were sentenced to prison for felonies but are now in county jail for drug treatment, or were jailed after being arrested or resentenced for violating their state parole.
The lawsuit dates to 1994 and resulted in a court-approved plan in 2001 to accommodate the needs of disabled inmates in state prisons. Tuesday's ruling applies to inmates who were sentenced to prison for felonies but are now in county jail for drug treatment, or were jailed after being arrested or resentenced for violating their state parole.
Despite assigning those inmates to county custody, the state remains responsible for maintaining equal access to educational and treatment programs and to "the fundamentals of life, such as sustenance, the use of toilet and bathing facilities, and elementary mobility and communication," Judge Stephen Reinhardt said in the 3-0 ruling.
The ruling is important because "the state is contracting out more and more" of its prisoners to local agencies, said Michael Bien, a lawyer for the inmates.
He said the court action was not aimed at requiring the state to provide wheelchairs, sign-language interpreters and other assistance to disabled jail inmates, but instead at ordering state prison and parole officials to notify counties about the inmates and their needs.
A recurring motif throughout this crisis has been the relegation of state responsibility to state facilities. The best example of this is the overcrowding crisis, which according to Governor Schwarzenegger's plan would be remedied, in part, by reclassifying offenses so that inmates would be incarcerated in county, rather than state, facilities. This modest success for the plaintiffs, requiring state actors to be in contact with county facilities, may be one of the first examples of cooperation. Since only joint action will eventually lead to decrowding, it is a step in the right direction.
Obama backing off strict crime policy
[Re-posted from POLITICO because: can you imagine replacing "Obama" with "Schwarzenegger" in this article? Nope, me neither, but it feels good to think about it...]
Obama backing off strict crime policy
by Josh Gerstein
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42004.html
For years, it was one of the GOP’s most potent political epithets — labeling a Democrat “soft on crime.”
But the Obama White House has taken the first steps in decades to move away from a strict lock-‘em-up mentality on crime — easing sentences for crack cocaine possession, launching a top-to-bottom review of sentencing policies and even sounding open to reviewing guidelines that call for lengthy prison terms for people convicted of child pornography offenses.
The moves — still tentative, to be sure — suggest that President Barack Obama’s aides are betting that the issue has lost some of its punch with voters more worried about terrorism and recession. In one measure of the new political climate surrounding the issue, the Obama administration actually felt free to boast that the new crack-sentencing bill would go easier on some drug criminals.
“The Fair Sentencing Act marks the first time in 40 years that Congress has reduced a mandatory minimum sentence,” said White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, who billed the new legislation as “monumental.”
Obama’s signing of long-debated legislation last month to reduce the disparity between prison sentences for crack and powdered cocaine is being hailed by some advocates as a watershed moment in the nation’s approach to criminal justice.
And even with a tough election looming, the Democratic Congress is showing a willingness to consider moving away from incarceration and toward rehabilitation and out-of-prison punishments that might have been attacked in the 1990s as the coddling of criminals.
At the urging of a conservative Democrat, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia , the House passed a bill in July to create a federal commission to study criminal sentences. The measure cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier in the year with little resistance from Republicans.
“I think the political landscape around the issue is shifting and I think that will provide room for the administration to address some of these issues,” said Jennifer Bellamy of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Advocates point to several reasons for the shift toward a less-draconian approach to crime and for its retreat as a hot-button political issue. Crime rates are at some of the lowest levels in a generation. Stories of offenders who got decades behind bars for playing minor roles in drug operations have generated some sympathy in the public. Huge budget woes facing states and the federal government are raising doubts about policies that are causing prison populations and costs to go up.
In addition, Republicans who once accused Democrats of being soft on crime now accuse them of being soft on terrorists. As a result, tinkering with the way run-of-the-mill criminals are treated doesn’t seem to be the political third rail it once was.
Mary Price of Families Against Mandatory Minimums noted that the crack-disparity bill passed in Congress with remarkably little consternation. “I think other concerns have crowded out some of the hysteria around crime,” Price said.
“Republicans could have said, ‘If this passes, we’ll make this an issue in the midterms.’ Nobody said that,” Price observed. “This was not an issue for Republicans.”
While most of the Obama administration’s moves toward rolling back some of the harshest aspects of the war on crime have been tentative, some have been surprising. For instance, a little-noticed letter issued by the Justice Department in June urged a federal commission to review the sentencing guidelines for child pornography offenses — a review that many advocates say would almost certainly result in lowering the recommended sentences in such cases.
“They’re saying, essentially, that they want to level sentences in the middle, but necessarily, leveling in the middle is almost demanding that they bring the guidelines down,” said Doug Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. “They’ve chosen language … saying we’re open to doing something that is not entirely tough.”
In another sign of the new climate, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of criminal sentencing policies soon after he came into office.
“Too much time has passed, too many people have been treated in a disparate manner and too many of our citizens have come to have doubts about our criminal justice system,” Holder said in June 2009. “We must be honest with each other and have the courage to ask difficult questions of ourselves and our system. We must break out of the old and tired partisan stances that have stood in the way of needed progress and reform. We have a moment in time that must be seized.”
The internal review endorsed lowering some crack sentences, something Obama had already promised to do, and publicly offered some vague suggestions on changes to mandatory minimums. Holder also issued a memo giving local federal prosecutors a bit more autonomy in charging decisions.
Another result of that review was a June letter that called for a new look at child porn sentences.
“The time is ripe for evaluating the current guidelines and considering whether reforms are warranted,” Jonathan Wroblewski, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Policy and Legislation, wrote to former judge and FBI director Bill Sessions, who heads the U.S. Sentencing Commission. “Consideration ought to be given to updating many aspects of the child pornography sentencing guidelines to better calibrate the severity and culpability of defendants' criminal conduct with the applicable guideline sentencing ranges.”
Justice’s call for a review came as defense attorneys have been gaining traction with arguments that the guidelines and mandatory minimums set by Congress call for excessively long sentences. Some lawyers contend that defendants who briefly exchange child porn photos or video online can actually get longer sentences than those who seek to molest children.
The Justice Department has disputed those arguments in court, but federal judges have increasingly given sentences below the guidelines. An assistant federal public defender from Missouri , Troy Stabenow, said he thinks the department’s decision is basically a tactical move to stem the slide towards lower sentences.
“It’s just the logical thing they needed to do,” said Stabenow. He said the notion that any politician would wade into the subject on his own volition boggles the mind.
“I would think no sane politician who values being reelected would want to engage in this area,” Stabenow said. “I don’t think there’s any criminal group that yields a more visceral response than the child pornography group.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman stressed that the June letter didn’t endorse higher or lower sentences for child pornography.
“We asked the sentencing commission to comprehensively review and report on the state of federal sentencing and to explore whether systemic reforms are needed,” Justice spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said. “We also asked the commission to review the guidelines for child exploitation and fraud offenses, but did not recommend necessarily higher or lower penalties for either child exploitation [or] fraud offenses.”
One prominent advocate for long sentences in child pornography cases, Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he welcomes a review of the guidelines and why judges are often giving lower sentences. However, he said he would oppose any overall reduction in the guidelines and does not think that’s what Justice officials want.
“If that is the implication, clearly, we would differ with that,” Allen said. “These are crime scene photos that re-victimize the child in the photo over and over again, [but] I think both of us recognize that the crime guidelines are dated.”
Despite the tentative moves in the direction of lessening some sentences, there remain numerous signs that Obama and his aides recognize that the issue could still be politically damaging.
When Obama signed the crack disparity bill, only still photographers were allowed in and the president issued no formal statement. The Justice Department’s sentencing review group has indicated it has no plan to issue a formal report that could become a political football. And, 18 months into his presidency, Obama has yet to issue a single commutation or even a pardon to an elderly ex-con seeking to clear his record.
Some advocates note that the crack sentencing bill was not particularly ambitious: it reduced the crack/powder disparity from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. And it wasn’t retroactive, so some who were sentenced under mandatory minimum laws may not benefit.
Asked whether Obama might grant requests to commute the sentences of those who would have gotten less punishment if they committed their crimes today, an administration official said the crack-disparity bill “reflected Congress’s judgment that the law should not be retroactive, [and] the president believes that the Fair Sentencing Act will go a long way toward ensuring that our sentencing laws are tough, consistent and fair.”
The official also downplayed the notion that Obama might offer some kind of blanket clemency for earlier crack-cocaine offenders, saying that “as a general matter, the president agrees with the Department of Justice’s long-held view that commutation is an extraordinary remedy that should only be granted in extraordinary circumstances.”
But activists are watching Obama on the issue. “Retroactivity will be the next battle,” Price said. “It would be cruelly ironic for us to take lessons learned from those who are currently serving, change the law for people going forward and then say, 'OK, the accident of the calendar you are condemned to serve much longer than people who, because of your experience, are getting out sooner.'”
In the heat of the presidential campaign, Obama sent mixed signals on crime. In the primary, he differed with Hillary Clinton by endorsing shortened sentences for some crack offenders already in jail. As the general election neared, he tacked to the right of the Supreme Court by criticizing the court’s 5-4 decision barring the use of the death penalty for child rapists who don’t kill their victims.
Berman said he thinks Obama and his aides can’t fully break with President Bill Clinton’s approach of trying to look as tough or even tougher than Republicans on crime.
“Obama wants to do something, I think, big on criminal justice and I think he’s absolutely afraid to,” Berman said. “Democrats are right to continue to fear tough-on-crime demagoguery. The lessons of Clinton continues to resonate. … This really is, inevitably, low-priority, high-risk kind of stuff.”
Obama also faces one factor Clinton did not: race. While 58 percent of federal inmates arewhite, Berman said some Americans are sure to have the perception that an African-American president is aiding criminals of his own race.
“Whether consciously or subconsciously, everyone understands that the first black president has to tread particularly cautiously in this area,” Berman said.
Obama backing off strict crime policy
by Josh Gerstein
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42004.html
For years, it was one of the GOP’s most potent political epithets — labeling a Democrat “soft on crime.”
But the Obama White House has taken the first steps in decades to move away from a strict lock-‘em-up mentality on crime — easing sentences for crack cocaine possession, launching a top-to-bottom review of sentencing policies and even sounding open to reviewing guidelines that call for lengthy prison terms for people convicted of child pornography offenses.
The moves — still tentative, to be sure — suggest that President Barack Obama’s aides are betting that the issue has lost some of its punch with voters more worried about terrorism and recession. In one measure of the new political climate surrounding the issue, the Obama administration actually felt free to boast that the new crack-sentencing bill would go easier on some drug criminals.
“The Fair Sentencing Act marks the first time in 40 years that Congress has reduced a mandatory minimum sentence,” said White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, who billed the new legislation as “monumental.”
Obama’s signing of long-debated legislation last month to reduce the disparity between prison sentences for crack and powdered cocaine is being hailed by some advocates as a watershed moment in the nation’s approach to criminal justice.
And even with a tough election looming, the Democratic Congress is showing a willingness to consider moving away from incarceration and toward rehabilitation and out-of-prison punishments that might have been attacked in the 1990s as the coddling of criminals.
At the urging of a conservative Democrat, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia , the House passed a bill in July to create a federal commission to study criminal sentences. The measure cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier in the year with little resistance from Republicans.
“I think the political landscape around the issue is shifting and I think that will provide room for the administration to address some of these issues,” said Jennifer Bellamy of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Advocates point to several reasons for the shift toward a less-draconian approach to crime and for its retreat as a hot-button political issue. Crime rates are at some of the lowest levels in a generation. Stories of offenders who got decades behind bars for playing minor roles in drug operations have generated some sympathy in the public. Huge budget woes facing states and the federal government are raising doubts about policies that are causing prison populations and costs to go up.
In addition, Republicans who once accused Democrats of being soft on crime now accuse them of being soft on terrorists. As a result, tinkering with the way run-of-the-mill criminals are treated doesn’t seem to be the political third rail it once was.
Mary Price of Families Against Mandatory Minimums noted that the crack-disparity bill passed in Congress with remarkably little consternation. “I think other concerns have crowded out some of the hysteria around crime,” Price said.
“Republicans could have said, ‘If this passes, we’ll make this an issue in the midterms.’ Nobody said that,” Price observed. “This was not an issue for Republicans.”
While most of the Obama administration’s moves toward rolling back some of the harshest aspects of the war on crime have been tentative, some have been surprising. For instance, a little-noticed letter issued by the Justice Department in June urged a federal commission to review the sentencing guidelines for child pornography offenses — a review that many advocates say would almost certainly result in lowering the recommended sentences in such cases.
“They’re saying, essentially, that they want to level sentences in the middle, but necessarily, leveling in the middle is almost demanding that they bring the guidelines down,” said Doug Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. “They’ve chosen language … saying we’re open to doing something that is not entirely tough.”
In another sign of the new climate, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of criminal sentencing policies soon after he came into office.
“Too much time has passed, too many people have been treated in a disparate manner and too many of our citizens have come to have doubts about our criminal justice system,” Holder said in June 2009. “We must be honest with each other and have the courage to ask difficult questions of ourselves and our system. We must break out of the old and tired partisan stances that have stood in the way of needed progress and reform. We have a moment in time that must be seized.”
The internal review endorsed lowering some crack sentences, something Obama had already promised to do, and publicly offered some vague suggestions on changes to mandatory minimums. Holder also issued a memo giving local federal prosecutors a bit more autonomy in charging decisions.
Another result of that review was a June letter that called for a new look at child porn sentences.
“The time is ripe for evaluating the current guidelines and considering whether reforms are warranted,” Jonathan Wroblewski, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Policy and Legislation, wrote to former judge and FBI director Bill Sessions, who heads the U.S. Sentencing Commission. “Consideration ought to be given to updating many aspects of the child pornography sentencing guidelines to better calibrate the severity and culpability of defendants' criminal conduct with the applicable guideline sentencing ranges.”
Justice’s call for a review came as defense attorneys have been gaining traction with arguments that the guidelines and mandatory minimums set by Congress call for excessively long sentences. Some lawyers contend that defendants who briefly exchange child porn photos or video online can actually get longer sentences than those who seek to molest children.
The Justice Department has disputed those arguments in court, but federal judges have increasingly given sentences below the guidelines. An assistant federal public defender from Missouri , Troy Stabenow, said he thinks the department’s decision is basically a tactical move to stem the slide towards lower sentences.
“It’s just the logical thing they needed to do,” said Stabenow. He said the notion that any politician would wade into the subject on his own volition boggles the mind.
“I would think no sane politician who values being reelected would want to engage in this area,” Stabenow said. “I don’t think there’s any criminal group that yields a more visceral response than the child pornography group.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman stressed that the June letter didn’t endorse higher or lower sentences for child pornography.
“We asked the sentencing commission to comprehensively review and report on the state of federal sentencing and to explore whether systemic reforms are needed,” Justice spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said. “We also asked the commission to review the guidelines for child exploitation and fraud offenses, but did not recommend necessarily higher or lower penalties for either child exploitation [or] fraud offenses.”
One prominent advocate for long sentences in child pornography cases, Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he welcomes a review of the guidelines and why judges are often giving lower sentences. However, he said he would oppose any overall reduction in the guidelines and does not think that’s what Justice officials want.
“If that is the implication, clearly, we would differ with that,” Allen said. “These are crime scene photos that re-victimize the child in the photo over and over again, [but] I think both of us recognize that the crime guidelines are dated.”
Despite the tentative moves in the direction of lessening some sentences, there remain numerous signs that Obama and his aides recognize that the issue could still be politically damaging.
When Obama signed the crack disparity bill, only still photographers were allowed in and the president issued no formal statement. The Justice Department’s sentencing review group has indicated it has no plan to issue a formal report that could become a political football. And, 18 months into his presidency, Obama has yet to issue a single commutation or even a pardon to an elderly ex-con seeking to clear his record.
Some advocates note that the crack sentencing bill was not particularly ambitious: it reduced the crack/powder disparity from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. And it wasn’t retroactive, so some who were sentenced under mandatory minimum laws may not benefit.
Asked whether Obama might grant requests to commute the sentences of those who would have gotten less punishment if they committed their crimes today, an administration official said the crack-disparity bill “reflected Congress’s judgment that the law should not be retroactive, [and] the president believes that the Fair Sentencing Act will go a long way toward ensuring that our sentencing laws are tough, consistent and fair.”
The official also downplayed the notion that Obama might offer some kind of blanket clemency for earlier crack-cocaine offenders, saying that “as a general matter, the president agrees with the Department of Justice’s long-held view that commutation is an extraordinary remedy that should only be granted in extraordinary circumstances.”
But activists are watching Obama on the issue. “Retroactivity will be the next battle,” Price said. “It would be cruelly ironic for us to take lessons learned from those who are currently serving, change the law for people going forward and then say, 'OK, the accident of the calendar you are condemned to serve much longer than people who, because of your experience, are getting out sooner.'”
In the heat of the presidential campaign, Obama sent mixed signals on crime. In the primary, he differed with Hillary Clinton by endorsing shortened sentences for some crack offenders already in jail. As the general election neared, he tacked to the right of the Supreme Court by criticizing the court’s 5-4 decision barring the use of the death penalty for child rapists who don’t kill their victims.
Berman said he thinks Obama and his aides can’t fully break with President Bill Clinton’s approach of trying to look as tough or even tougher than Republicans on crime.
“Obama wants to do something, I think, big on criminal justice and I think he’s absolutely afraid to,” Berman said. “Democrats are right to continue to fear tough-on-crime demagoguery. The lessons of Clinton continues to resonate. … This really is, inevitably, low-priority, high-risk kind of stuff.”
Obama also faces one factor Clinton did not: race. While 58 percent of federal inmates arewhite, Berman said some Americans are sure to have the perception that an African-American president is aiding criminals of his own race.
“Whether consciously or subconsciously, everyone understands that the first black president has to tread particularly cautiously in this area,” Berman said.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Eight Prisons in the Netherlands Close: Undercrowding
I found this interesting NRC Handelsblad story via the MPP blog:
The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system.
The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system.
A decline in crime has left many cells empty.During the 1990s the Netherlands faced a shortage of prison cells, but a decline in crime has since led to overcapacity in the prison system. The country now has capacity for 14,000 prisoners but only 12,000 detainees.
Interestingly, this "crisis" in the Netherlands is to be remedied by outsourcing prisoners from Belgium. I leave the analogies and ironic head-shaking to you, gentle readers.
Interestingly, this "crisis" in the Netherlands is to be remedied by outsourcing prisoners from Belgium. I leave the analogies and ironic head-shaking to you, gentle readers.
-----
Many thanks to Andrea Lobel-Shainblum for the link.
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