Posted Jun 16 2011

Thank you for reminding us that " California can make better decisions to value education, prevention and rehabilitation over costly, ineffective incarceration".

The Supreme Court upheld the constitution and now we must reduce the number of prisoners that are packed like cattle in feedlots. We definitely need rehab. programs and alternative punishment.

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

Who profits from failed criminal justice and horrifically overcrowded prisons that are bankrupting states across the nation?

District attorneys and prosecutors who are promoted for winning cases and harsh sentences at any cost;

Tough-on-crime scare tactic politicians hoping for votes;

Guard employee unions;

For-profit-contract-bed-privatized-corporation prisons that profit not from reforming people, but when the recidivism rate goes up;

Parole department in California where everyone released is on parole;

Three strikes law that sends people to prison for 25+ years over petty crimes such as stealing a pizza;

The bail bond industry that benefits from unnecessary criminal justice practices that increase incarceration;

Rigged line-ups that get faulty convictions and promotions;

Increased recidivism from the requirement to check prior-arrest/conviction boxes on employment, government, and rental applications for those who have been crime-free for years;

Serving high carb, low protein food that hurts prisoners health and requires more spending on contracted medical services;

Private companies that protest when prisons try to contract out prisoner labor which increases job skills and self worth;

Posted Jun 17 2011

While I agree with the article, the bigger problem is that schools in urban, poverty stricken areas suffer when the CA Legislature makes cuts. The kids that are "at risk" could be identified very early on by socio-economic factors, learning problems, family structure (i.e., mom or dad incarcerated, living with grandmother, aunt, etc.,), and if there was money available for services to the FAMILY as well as to the child, we could keep many of these children from growing up uneducated and eventually ending up in the criminal justice system.

The money that is spent on incarceration is far more than the money that could be saved if invested early. A food program at school is NOT enough to address the needs of these children, including children in the foster care system. The children that are the most at risk need wrap around services, including tutoring, counseling, mentoring (Chief Muhammad knows about mentoring), health care preventative services, and even simple things like new shoes every six months. IF we wait until they are incarcerated as juveniles for selling drugs to survive to intervene, shame on us as a society. The schools in Oakland could easily identify families and children that are struggling in school, that are missing school, that are not performing at the appropriate grade level, have learning problems and that need additional services. Start earlier than trying to fix the prison system! The discrimination is clear, poor people don't vote, so it is easy for the Assembly and the House to take money from these areas. Further, when wealthier communities lose money from the schools in their areas through budget cuts, they rally together and raise money for their schools. Oakland cannot do that, and Oakland's communities are struggling.

Posted Jun 17 2011

While I agree with the article, the bigger problem is that schools in urban, poverty stricken areas suffer when the CA Legislature makes cuts. The kids that are "at risk" could be identified very early on by socio-economic factors, learning problems, family structure (i.e., mom or dad incarcerated, living with grandmother, aunt, etc.,), and if there was money available for services to the FAMILY as well as to the child, we could keep many of these children from growing up uneducated and eventually ending up in the criminal justice system.

The money that is spent on incarceration is far more than the money that could be saved if invested early. A food program at school is NOT enough to address the needs of these children, including children in the foster care system. The children that are the most at risk need wrap around services, including tutoring, counseling, mentoring (Chief Muhammad knows about mentoring), health care preventative services, and even simple things like new shoes every six months. IF we wait until they are incarcerated as juveniles for selling drugs to survive to intervene, shame on us as a society. The schools in Oakland could easily identify families and children that are struggling in school, that are missing school, that are not performing at the appropriate grade level, have learning problems and that need additional services. Start earlier than trying to fix the prison system! The discrimination is clear, poor people don't vote, so it is easy for the Assembly and the House to take money from these areas. Further, when wealthier communities lose money from the schools in their areas through budget cuts, they rally together and raise money for their schools. Oakland cannot do that, and Oakland's communities are struggling.

Posted Jun 20 2011

Kicking the convict down the road
By Paul Sutton As a professor of criminal justice, I am writing this during my 100th weeklong tour of California prisons. The tour is visiting eight prisons in five days. Today (May 26) was San Quentin, normally peaceful but the scene of a riot four days ago. Tomorrow, I lead 24 San Diego State criminal justice students into Folsom State Prison and Cal State Prison at Sacramento, which six days ago had its worst riot in 15 years.I was in Pelican Bay State Prison on the day, 20 years ago, that the court ordered California to do something about the state’s deplorable prison conditions and inmate crowding. Coincidentally, I was in California Men’s Colony on the day (May 23) when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its most recent decision to force the state to find a solution to the problems the courts had recognized a generation before. In the interim, the debate has seen more heat than progress. U-T reporter Matthew Hall’s piece (“Court rules state must cut prison population,” May 24) has raised some interesting points and has generated much additional heat – much of it symptomatic of why so little has changed over so many years when so much has needed to change. Much of the debate misses the point, and much of the interchange is based on bias, racism, prejudice and ignorance. That is both understandable and tragic.
There are many problems and many issues. They are both substantial and imminent. They will not be solved without careful and thoughtful discussion. And the forging of remedies simply cannot and must not be left to politicians or practitioners, if we are to find our way out of our current mess.
There are many aspects to this problem. The issues include big considerations like sentencing, parole, rehabilitation, budgets, the nature of incarceration and so on. Those are critical and must be part of any solution. But there are other, obvious things, that no one is addressing. Perhaps those who know better are best served in this debate by keeping the public in the dark about certain critical realities and to let us argue about the irrelevant and benign. At the heart of the matter, for example, is the issue of so-called realignment, i.e., moving inmates from state prisons to county jails. Despite the funding and logistical problems such a proposal raises, no one is addressing the plain fact that county jails in California are simply not equipped to handle offenders sentenced to longer terms than those offenders they currently hold. They not only don’t have the room, the staff, the facilities, the programs, the infrastructure, the philosophy, the training or the architectural requisites to do what realignment expects or demands them to do. Simply put, jails were not built, intended or capable of holding massive numbers of felons for long periods of time. That is what prisons – however badly – were designed to do. And however convenient it might be to solve the state prison crowding problem by shifting the burden from the state’s prisons to the ill-equipped and already overburdened county jail systems, it is a terrible idea. It is worse than “kicking the can (of correctional problems) down the road.” It is literally the problem of kicking the convict down the road. And that will not help the problem, the public or the convict. Things will be worse, as a result, plain and simple. Los Angeles and San Diego are responsible for most of our state’s inmate population. Accordingly, they will be the likely target of most of the realignment. Over the past 30 years, I have visited and studied most of the jails in San Diego County and the largest of those in Los Angeles County. I have been in and out of most of the prisons in California – from RJD (Richard J. Donovan) on the Mexican border all the way to Pelican Bay on the Oregon border – 100 times. I have seen the best and worst of both worlds – jails and prisons. And they are very different worlds. Each does some things well and some things poorly. We are proposing to shift tens of thousands of people from one system that is designed for one thing into a system that is designed to do an entirely different thing. That is folly. It is as if everything believes – without knowing better or caring – that a bed is a bed, a cell is a cell, and a lockup is a lockup; that any one of them is as good – or bad – as any other. Nothing could be further from the truth: they are very, very different. And saying they are equally competent to do the same things does not make them so. Until someone with some sense – and some authority – stands up and makes that point loudly and clearly, we condemn ourselves to even more frustration, waste, expense, public harm and human suffering than our current correctional system has wrought for generations. Sutton is a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University. He has written, spoken and produced documentary films about California prisons. He has conducted weeklong tours of California prisons for more than 2,000 of his students for nearly 30 years.

Posted Jun 20 2011

Read this alternative view from an actual expert on the subject....
Kicking the convict down the road
By Paul Sutton
As a professor of criminal justice, I am writing this during my 100th weeklong tour of California prisons. The tour is visiting eight prisons in five days. Today (May 26) was San Quentin, normally peaceful but the scene of a riot four days ago. Tomorrow, I lead 24 San Diego State criminal justice students into Folsom State Prison and Cal State Prison at Sacramento, which six days ago had its worst riot in 15 years.I was in Pelican Bay State Prison on the day, 20 years ago, that the court ordered California to do something about the state’s deplorable prison conditions and inmate crowding. Coincidentally, I was in California Men’s Colony on the day (May 23) when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its most recent decision to force the state to find a solution to the problems the courts had recognized a generation before. In the interim, the debate has seen more heat than progress. U-T reporter Matthew Hall’s piece (“Court rules state must cut prison population,” May 24) has raised some interesting points and has generated much additional heat – much of it symptomatic of why so little has changed over so many years when so much has needed to change. Much of the debate misses the point, and much of the interchange is based on bias, racism, prejudice and ignorance. That is both understandable and tragic.
There are many problems and many issues. They are both substantial and imminent. They will not be solved without careful and thoughtful discussion. And the forging of remedies simply cannot and must not be left to politicians or practitioners, if we are to find our way out of our current mess.
There are many aspects to this problem. The issues include big considerations like sentencing, parole, rehabilitation, budgets, the nature of incarceration and so on. Those are critical and must be part of any solution. But there are other, obvious things, that no one is addressing. Perhaps those who know better are best served in this debate by keeping the public in the dark about certain critical realities and to let us argue about the irrelevant and benign. At the heart of the matter, for example, is the issue of so-called realignment, i.e., moving inmates from state prisons to county jails. Despite the funding and logistical problems such a proposal raises, no one is addressing the plain fact that county jails in California are simply not equipped to handle offenders sentenced to longer terms than those offenders they currently hold. They not only don’t have the room, the staff, the facilities, the programs, the infrastructure, the philosophy, the training or the architectural requisites to do what realignment expects or demands them to do. Simply put, jails were not built, intended or capable of holding massive numbers of felons for long periods of time. That is what prisons – however badly – were designed to do. And however convenient it might be to solve the state prison crowding problem by shifting the burden from the state’s prisons to the ill-equipped and already overburdened county jail systems, it is a terrible idea. It is worse than “kicking the can (of correctional problems) down the road.” It is literally the problem of kicking the convict down the road. And that will not help the problem, the public or the convict. Things will be worse, as a result, plain and simple. Los Angeles and San Diego are responsible for most of our state’s inmate population. Accordingly, they will be the likely target of most of the realignment. Over the past 30 years, I have visited and studied most of the jails in San Diego County and the largest of those in Los Angeles County. I have been in and out of most of the prisons in California – from RJD (Richard J. Donovan) on the Mexican border all the way to Pelican Bay on the Oregon border – 100 times. I have seen the best and worst of both worlds – jails and prisons. And they are very different worlds. Each does some things well and some things poorly. We are proposing to shift tens of thousands of people from one system that is designed for one thing into a system that is designed to do an entirely different thing. That is folly. It is as if everything believes – without knowing better or caring – that a bed is a bed, a cell is a cell, and a lockup is a lockup; that any one of them is as good – or bad – as any other. Nothing could be further from the truth: they are very, very different. And saying they are equally competent to do the same things does not make them so. Until someone with some sense – and some authority – stands up and makes that point loudly and clearly, we condemn ourselves to even more frustration, waste, expense, public harm and human suffering than our current correctional system has wrought for generations. Sutton is a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University. He has written, spoken and produced documentary films about California prisons. He has conducted weeklong tours of California prisons for more than 2,000 of his students for nearly 30 years.

Posted Jun 20 2011

Read this alternative view from an actual expert on the subject....
Kicking the convict down the road
By Paul Sutton
As a professor of criminal justice, I am writing this during my 100th weeklong tour of California prisons. The tour is visiting eight prisons in five days. Today (May 26) was San Quentin, normally peaceful but the scene of a riot four days ago. Tomorrow, I lead 24 San Diego State criminal justice students into Folsom State Prison and Cal State Prison at Sacramento, which six days ago had its worst riot in 15 years.I was in Pelican Bay State Prison on the day, 20 years ago, that the court ordered California to do something about the state’s deplorable prison conditions and inmate crowding. Coincidentally, I was in California Men’s Colony on the day (May 23) when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its most recent decision to force the state to find a solution to the problems the courts had recognized a generation before. In the interim, the debate has seen more heat than progress. U-T reporter Matthew Hall’s piece (“Court rules state must cut prison population,” May 24) has raised some interesting points and has generated much additional heat – much of it symptomatic of why so little has changed over so many years when so much has needed to change. Much of the debate misses the point, and much of the interchange is based on bias, racism, prejudice and ignorance. That is both understandable and tragic.
There are many problems and many issues. They are both substantial and imminent. They will not be solved without careful and thoughtful discussion. And the forging of remedies simply cannot and must not be left to politicians or practitioners, if we are to find our way out of our current mess.
There are many aspects to this problem. The issues include big considerations like sentencing, parole, rehabilitation, budgets, the nature of incarceration and so on. Those are critical and must be part of any solution. But there are other, obvious things, that no one is addressing. Perhaps those who know better are best served in this debate by keeping the public in the dark about certain critical realities and to let us argue about the irrelevant and benign. At the heart of the matter, for example, is the issue of so-called realignment, i.e., moving inmates from state prisons to county jails. Despite the funding and logistical problems such a proposal raises, no one is addressing the plain fact that county jails in California are simply not equipped to handle offenders sentenced to longer terms than those offenders they currently hold. They not only don’t have the room, the staff, the facilities, the programs, the infrastructure, the philosophy, the training or the architectural requisites to do what realignment expects or demands them to do. Simply put, jails were not built, intended or capable of holding massive numbers of felons for long periods of time. That is what prisons – however badly – were designed to do. And however convenient it might be to solve the state prison crowding problem by shifting the burden from the state’s prisons to the ill-equipped and already overburdened county jail systems, it is a terrible idea. It is worse than “kicking the can (of correctional problems) down the road.” It is literally the problem of kicking the convict down the road. And that will not help the problem, the public or the convict. Things will be worse, as a result, plain and simple. Los Angeles and San Diego are responsible for most of our state’s inmate population. Accordingly, they will be the likely target of most of the realignment. Over the past 30 years, I have visited and studied most of the jails in San Diego County and the largest of those in Los Angeles County. I have been in and out of most of the prisons in California – from RJD (Richard J. Donovan) on the Mexican border all the way to Pelican Bay on the Oregon border – 100 times. I have seen the best and worst of both worlds – jails and prisons. And they are very different worlds. Each does some things well and some things poorly. We are proposing to shift tens of thousands of people from one system that is designed for one thing into a system that is designed to do an entirely different thing. That is folly. It is as if everything believes – without knowing better or caring – that a bed is a bed, a cell is a cell, and a lockup is a lockup; that any one of them is as good – or bad – as any other. Nothing could be further from the truth: they are very, very different. And saying they are equally competent to do the same things does not make them so. Until someone with some sense – and some authority – stands up and makes that point loudly and clearly, we condemn ourselves to even more frustration, waste, expense, public harm and human suffering than our current correctional system has wrought for generations. Sutton is a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University. He has written, spoken and produced documentary films about California prisons. He has conducted weeklong tours of California prisons for more than 2,000 of his students for nearly 30 years.

Posted Jun 20 2011

Read this alternative view from an actual expert on the subject....
Kicking the convict down the road
By Paul Sutton
As a professor of criminal justice, I am writing this during my 100th weeklong tour of California prisons. The tour is visiting eight prisons in five days. Today (May 26) was San Quentin, normally peaceful but the scene of a riot four days ago. Tomorrow, I lead 24 San Diego State criminal justice students into Folsom State Prison and Cal State Prison at Sacramento, which six days ago had its worst riot in 15 years.I was in Pelican Bay State Prison on the day, 20 years ago, that the court ordered California to do something about the state’s deplorable prison conditions and inmate crowding. Coincidentally, I was in California Men’s Colony on the day (May 23) when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its most recent decision to force the state to find a solution to the problems the courts had recognized a generation before. In the interim, the debate has seen more heat than progress. U-T reporter Matthew Hall’s piece (“Court rules state must cut prison population,” May 24) has raised some interesting points and has generated much additional heat – much of it symptomatic of why so little has changed over so many years when so much has needed to change. Much of the debate misses the point, and much of the interchange is based on bias, racism, prejudice and ignorance. That is both understandable and tragic.
There are many problems and many issues. They are both substantial and imminent. They will not be solved without careful and thoughtful discussion. And the forging of remedies simply cannot and must not be left to politicians or practitioners, if we are to find our way out of our current mess.
There are many aspects to this problem. The issues include big considerations like sentencing, parole, rehabilitation, budgets, the nature of incarceration and so on. Those are critical and must be part of any solution. But there are other, obvious things, that no one is addressing. Perhaps those who know better are best served in this debate by keeping the public in the dark about certain critical realities and to let us argue about the irrelevant and benign. At the heart of the matter, for example, is the issue of so-called realignment, i.e., moving inmates from state prisons to county jails. Despite the funding and logistical problems such a proposal raises, no one is addressing the plain fact that county jails in California are simply not equipped to handle offenders sentenced to longer terms than those offenders they currently hold. They not only don’t have the room, the staff, the facilities, the programs, the infrastructure, the philosophy, the training or the architectural requisites to do what realignment expects or demands them to do. Simply put, jails were not built, intended or capable of holding massive numbers of felons for long periods of time. That is what prisons – however badly – were designed to do. And however convenient it might be to solve the state prison crowding problem by shifting the burden from the state’s prisons to the ill-equipped and already overburdened county jail systems, it is a terrible idea. It is worse than “kicking the can (of correctional problems) down the road.” It is literally the problem of kicking the convict down the road. And that will not help the problem, the public or the convict. Things will be worse, as a result, plain and simple. Los Angeles and San Diego are responsible for most of our state’s inmate population. Accordingly, they will be the likely target of most of the realignment. Over the past 30 years, I have visited and studied most of the jails in San Diego County and the largest of those in Los Angeles County. I have been in and out of most of the prisons in California – from RJD (Richard J. Donovan) on the Mexican border all the way to Pelican Bay on the Oregon border – 100 times. I have seen the best and worst of both worlds – jails and prisons. And they are very different worlds. Each does some things well and some things poorly. We are proposing to shift tens of thousands of people from one system that is designed for one thing into a system that is designed to do an entirely different thing. That is folly. It is as if everything believes – without knowing better or caring – that a bed is a bed, a cell is a cell, and a lockup is a lockup; that any one of them is as good – or bad – as any other. Nothing could be further from the truth: they are very, very different. And saying they are equally competent to do the same things does not make them so. Until someone with some sense – and some authority – stands up and makes that point loudly and clearly, we condemn ourselves to even more frustration, waste, expense, public harm and human suffering than our current correctional system has wrought for generations. Sutton is a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University. He has written, spoken and produced documentary films about California prisons. He has conducted weeklong tours of California prisons for more than 2,000 of his students for nearly 30 years.

Posted Jun 20 2011

Read this alternative view from an actual expert on the subject....
Kicking the convict down the road
By Paul Sutton
As a professor of criminal justice, I am writing this during my 100th weeklong tour of California prisons. The tour is visiting eight prisons in five days. Today (May 26) was San Quentin, normally peaceful but the scene of a riot four days ago. Tomorrow, I lead 24 San Diego State criminal justice students into Folsom State Prison and Cal State Prison at Sacramento, which six days ago had its worst riot in 15 years.I was in Pelican Bay State Prison on the day, 20 years ago, that the court ordered California to do something about the state’s deplorable prison conditions and inmate crowding. Coincidentally, I was in California Men’s Colony on the day (May 23) when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its most recent decision to force the state to find a solution to the problems the courts had recognized a generation before. In the interim, the debate has seen more heat than progress. U-T reporter Matthew Hall’s piece (“Court rules state must cut prison population,” May 24) has raised some interesting points and has generated much additional heat – much of it symptomatic of why so little has changed over so many years when so much has needed to change. Much of the debate misses the point, and much of the interchange is based on bias, racism, prejudice and ignorance. That is both understandable and tragic.
There are many problems and many issues. They are both substantial and imminent. They will not be solved without careful and thoughtful discussion. And the forging of remedies simply cannot and must not be left to politicians or practitioners, if we are to find our way out of our current mess.
There are many aspects to this problem. The issues include big considerations like sentencing, parole, rehabilitation, budgets, the nature of incarceration and so on. Those are critical and must be part of any solution. But there are other, obvious things, that no one is addressing. Perhaps those who know better are best served in this debate by keeping the public in the dark about certain critical realities and to let us argue about the irrelevant and benign. At the heart of the matter, for example, is the issue of so-called realignment, i.e., moving inmates from state prisons to county jails. Despite the funding and logistical problems such a proposal raises, no one is addressing the plain fact that county jails in California are simply not equipped to handle offenders sentenced to longer terms than those offenders they currently hold. They not only don’t have the room, the staff, the facilities, the programs, the infrastructure, the philosophy, the training or the architectural requisites to do what realignment expects or demands them to do. Simply put, jails were not built, intended or capable of holding massive numbers of felons for long periods of time. That is what prisons – however badly – were designed to do. And however convenient it might be to solve the state prison crowding problem by shifting the burden from the state’s prisons to the ill-equipped and already overburdened county jail systems, it is a terrible idea. It is worse than “kicking the can (of correctional problems) down the road.” It is literally the problem of kicking the convict down the road. And that will not help the problem, the public or the convict. Things will be worse, as a result, plain and simple. Los Angeles and San Diego are responsible for most of our state’s inmate population. Accordingly, they will be the likely target of most of the realignment. Over the past 30 years, I have visited and studied most of the jails in San Diego County and the largest of those in Los Angeles County. I have been in and out of most of the prisons in California – from RJD (Richard J. Donovan) on the Mexican border all the way to Pelican Bay on the Oregon border – 100 times. I have seen the best and worst of both worlds – jails and prisons. And they are very different worlds. Each does some things well and some things poorly. We are proposing to shift tens of thousands of people from one system that is designed for one thing into a system that is designed to do an entirely different thing. That is folly. It is as if everything believes – without knowing better or caring – that a bed is a bed, a cell is a cell, and a lockup is a lockup; that any one of them is as good – or bad – as any other. Nothing could be further from the truth: they are very, very different. And saying they are equally competent to do the same things does not make them so. Until someone with some sense – and some authority – stands up and makes that point loudly and clearly, we condemn ourselves to even more frustration, waste, expense, public harm and human suffering than our current correctional system has wrought for generations. Sutton is a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University. He has written, spoken and produced documentary films about California prisons. He has conducted weeklong tours of California prisons for more than 2,000 of his students for nearly 30 years.

Posted Jun 20 2011

Enjoyed the article. The AB109 formula is flawed. EBMUD and PG&E utilizes the same sort of formula when calculating rates. They both encouraged restricting use of the resources, then they reward you by telling you that you don't use enough of the resource to garner a return for your complying. Big business and gov't!

Posted Jun 23 2011

We are all behind you and your inovative ideas.