HealthyCal.org

Photo by Marc Soller via Flickr.

By Callie Shanafelt

District Attorney Michael Ramos worries that crime will increase in San Bernardino County as a result of AB 109, the new law requiring counties to manage non-serious, non-sexual, non-violent offenders in their jails, probation departments and courts.

“When we sentence people like that,” Ramos said, “they go into the front door of the jail – somebody’s got to come out the back door.”

San Bernardino County doesn’t have space for all the low-level offenders they need to incarcerate in their jails after October 1.

The effects of the law will remain unclear until after – perhaps months after –prison reform starts in a few weeks. For now, the only thing district attorneys around the state can be sure of is that their caseload will increase with low-level parole violators.

Instead of being processed through the state parole board, people who violate probation will now be handled in county courts.

AB 109 also reduces the maximum sentence for a parole violation from one year to six months with one day’s credit for each day served, which could mean parole violations only lead to a 90-day sentence.

This change could mean they choose to charge people with a new offense, instead of the parole violation, said Karen Meredith, Assistant District Attorney in Alameda County. Whatever DAs decide to do, they will have more people supervised under probation and “across the board this may increase new violations,” Meredith said.

DA offices and county court systems still need to clarify the issues that are up to their discretion and understand the parameters of the new law.

At a recent meeting where district attorneys tried to understand how AB 109 will affect them, Santa Clara University Assistant Law Professor David Ball realized one thing—that no one fully understands the implications of the complicated bill.

“I left that meeting pretty concerned that the law really needs to be either simpler or clearer or there needs to be more time for people to study it or understand it,” Ball said.

There are a lot of conditions within the legislation, such as a list of 60 low-level crimes that will still require incarceration in state prison. Sometimes the distinctions between non-serious and serious crimes seem arbitrary.

“You can sell three pounds of cocaine and be sent to county jail but you sell horse meat and you are sent to state prison,” Alameda County DA Meredith said.

The bill creates new possibilities for judges to use their discretion in creative and alternative sentencing. Meredith said the intent of the legislation is to try to reduce recidivism by investing in communities. “Our office is going to embrace that,” she said.

While DA Ramos supports the intent of the legislation, he has his doubts that it will work. “I hope I’m wrong, but even if we do the best in the world on rehabilitation, it’s not going to happen for months,” Ramos said.

“What concerns us most is the financial picture,” Ramos said. “Nobody says it’s ongoing. We hope the state doesn’t dump this on us then leave us.”

The current allocation of funds is a controversial aspect of the legislation. The current funding formula, developed by the State Department of Finance and agreed to by County Administrative Officers (CAO) and California State Association of Counties (CSAC) is weighted so that counties that have been sending more low-level offenders to state prison get a larger percentage of the $354 million allocated to realignment in the first year.

San Bernardino County was classified as a “high-use” county in Ball’s recent study, while Alameda County was classified as “low-use.” The two counties are nearly identical when comparing population size and crime rates. Yet, using the current formula, San Bernardino will get $25.8 million in additional funds from the state the first year, while Alameda gets $9.2 million.

Alameda County has been able to keep people out of state prisons in the past by using alternative sentencing involving probation and drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, Meredith said.

Advocates for Alameda and other “low-use” counties want an allocation of funds based on population and crime rates instead of past state prison use.

District Attorney Ramos points out that each county has different politics. “In San Bernardino we’re a very conservative county,” Ramos said. “We are tough on crime and lead the state in state prison commitments per capita.”

Some experts don’t think a tough-on-crime stance makes for the best policy. “Prison is one policy choice among many for how to deal with crime problems,” Ball said, “It’s expensive and less effective.”

But DA Ramos thinks that putting perpetrators in prison helps crime victims heal.

“I see the faces of people who’ve been victimized and I’ve got to be their voice,” Ramos said. “If I’m going to be judged for being tough on crime, then so be it.”

San Bernardino County is considering using electronic monitoring and in-home detention to reduce the number of people in county jails. Ramos also wants to use flash incarceration, putting parole and probation violators in jail for a few days at a time.

Two-thirds of the people in county jails today are people waiting to be sentenced. One way to reduce the number of people in jail, Ball suggests, would be to release more of those people on their own recognizance based on a better risk-assessment tool.

But DA Ramos isn’t likely to take Ball’s advice. “I have concerns about that,” Ramos said. “When somebody commits a crime and sits in jail, they are more likely to plead guilty.”

Alameda County is considering many possibilities for adjusting to realignment, Meredith said. She doesn’t think it is likely they would release more people on their own recognizance. Instead, they are exploring new risk assessment tools, electronic monitoring and releasing people on work furloughs.

“In any of these uses of these instruments we have to be protective of public safety and victim rights,” Meredith said.

DA Ramos remains afraid that crime in San Bernardino County will increase with these reforms.

“When you have people that should have been in prison that are now out on the streets and they don’t have jobs and they’re hooked on drugs and they are going to commit crimes.” Ramos said. “No doubt.”

But according to Ball, studies show incarcerating low-level offenders in state prisons or high-intensity programming can turn them into more serious public safety risks.

“If you send somebody who is low-risk into a high-risk environment more is not better,” Ball said. “More can be much worse.”

Realignment is a step in the right direction, Ball said. “Ideally, counties are going to be resource constrained,” says Ball “the hope is that people are going to have to get smarter about who they do what to.”

Violent and serious offenders need the bulk of criminal justice resources, Ball said.

A recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California predicts that some district attorneys will opt for what’s called up-charging when dealing with realignment. Instead of charging someone with a crime that ensures they serve their sentence in county jail, they would charge them with a crime that would land them in state prison in order to avoid the cost of local incarceration.

Both San Bernardino County District Attorney Ramos and Alameda County Assistant District Attorney Meredith dispute this fear. “We would not do that,” Meredith said. “We charge now and we will always charge the appropriate charge for the offense.”

Although the long-term implications of this new legislation are still unclear, there is an unprecedented amount of collaboration within county criminal justice programs and counties statewide to figure out what to do.

Such collaboration and a holistic approach will be key to realignment’s success, Ball said. Over time, counties will track each person handled differently as a result of the legislation and hope to learn how to better deal with this low-risk population.

“It took us a long time to get us into the situation we’re in,” Ball said. “And it’s going to take a long time to get out of it.”

More women offenders expected under county supervision after AB 109

Photo by Marc Soller via Flickr.

By Heather Tirado Gilligan

Beatrice Smith-Dyer went to Chowchilla prison for killing her abusive husband at the age of 41. Her marriage, she said, was the last in a string of damaging relationships that started when she was a child.

“It wasn’t just him – it was all the abuse I suffered throughout my life,” Smith-Dyer said. She was physically and sexually abused as a child, she said. Smith-Dyer self-medicated, struggling with drug addiction in her late teens. She got sober in her early 20s and developed a career as an addiction counselor, but never really healed from the trauma of her childhood years, she said.

That lack of healing led her to marry a man who abused her, hit her children, killed her dog and nailed her furniture to the floor when it looked like she might leave him. Eventually, Smith-Dyer killed her husband during an argument. She went to prison for sixteen years for second-degree murder. She was released last year with assistance from the Habeas Project, a non-profit that connects imprisoned battered women who didn’t present evidence of their abuse at trial with pro-bono lawyers.

Smith-Dyer’s story is both typical and unusual for women in prison, advocates and experts say. The overwhelming majority of women in California’s prisons have suffered from abuse in their lives, like Smith-Dyer.

But unlike Smith-Dyer, most women in prison are there for less serious crimes.

Half of the women in the state’s prisons are serving terms for non-serious, non-violent and non-sexual crimes, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Most women who commit crime fall squarely, in other words, into the population that will be affected by AB 109.

After AB 109 – the historic prison realignment legislation aimed at reducing the prison population – takes effect in a few weeks, responsibility for low-level offenders shifts from the state to the counties. Each county will decide how to respond to women who were once sent to prison and who have rehabilitative needs and challenges that are often distinct from men’s.

“Approximately 85 percent of our female client population have suffered either physical or emotional abuse,” said Wendy Still, San Francisco County’s chief of probation. Like probation chiefs across the state, Still is in charge of developing plans to manage the convicts newly under county supervision.

San Francisco County submitted their plan for the approval of the Board of Supervisors weeks ago, as other counties continue to debate the best way to manage the influx of offenders that will begin arriving in October. Still is already looking ahead to revising to the plan again for 2012, with changes she said will include special help for women.

Still is uniquely qualified to oversee what experts call gender specific programming. Before leading San Francisco’s probation department, Still worked as the associate director of Female Offender Services for CDCR. Next year’s plan for San Francisco, she said, will include “gender responsive, culturally competent and trauma-informed services.”

That means that probation will administer different needs assessments to men and women clients. Probation officers will also have specialized caseloads – some will only manage women offenders.

Such services are sorely needed, according to criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind, an expert in women and crime and co-author of The Woman Offender. “Women’s reentry,” she said, “is a challenge.”

Most of the women in prison are drug involved, including drug use and some low-level sales. Before the war on drugs started in the 1960s, these women would have been on probation rather than in prison, Chesney-Lind said.

A significant number of women are in prison because they are addicts who relapsed when they went back to the community and had their parole revoked. Of the 7,000 plus women in prison in California in 2009, one in five was there for failing drug tests while on parole, Chesney-Lind notes. “That’s a huge population,” she said.

Under AB 109, non-violent offenders will no longer be sent to state prison for violations.

Other common offenses among women are property crime – they tend to commit larceny, welfare and credit card fraud, according to Chesney-Lind.

“Those are what we call survival crimes,” Chief Still said of the offenses women tend to commit. These crimes also support drug habits for women who are self-medicating after past trauma, Still added.

Women’s first priorities when they are released from prison are to be reunited with their children – half of women in prison are mothers – and to stay sober, Chesney-Lind said. What they need to meet these goals is housing and treatment, she added.

But their lives tend to be more complicated than men’s, Chesney-Lind said. A felony conviction excludes otherwise eligible people from public housing regardless of gender, but it’s not unusual for men to have a girlfriend or wife who remains eligible for public housing. The same is not true for women who have committed a felony, Chesney-Lind said.

Like men, however, women with a felony conviction struggle to find work. Once their most pressing needs are met– reuniting their families, finding drug treatment, employment and housing – they will likely still need ongoing counseling, Chesney-Lind said.

Generally, counties will differ significantly in how they use treatment as a response to low-level offenders under AB 109, said Dean Misczynski, adjunct policy fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “There are 58 counties,” Misczynski said. “We are going to see 58 ways of implementing this plan.”

“I do think this is an opportunity for the locals,” Still said. Like other probation chiefs, Still described the initiative as underfunded.

Failure to attend to women’s reentry needs has high costs, according to Susan Burton. Burton is executive director of A New Way of Life, a housing and reentry program for women who have been released from prison. Since A New Way of Life was established 13 years ago, 600 women have passed through their housing program. The program, Burton said, has a 78 percent success rate.

“We offer them free choice in their lives,” Burton said. The women in the housing program are given assistance with education, employment. They are also allowed to come and go as they please, without restrictions like curfews.

“It’s just a matter of treating people with dignity and respect,” said Burton, who estimates that 65 percent of her clients acknowledge past abuse and 80 percent have an addiction. “We tell them, ‘what’s happened in your life is horrible. We can’t change the past, but we can change the future.’”

Such an approach is cost-effective, Burton said. A year at A New Way of Life costs $14,000 per person and women typically leave on track to be a contributor to society.

In contrast, she said, it takes $30,000 to $40,000 to incarcerate someone in a jail, and they leave “broken and in need of repair.”

Trying to respond to the needs of women who commit crimes isn’t making excuses for their behavior, Chief Still said.

Ultimately, Still and other experts and advocates said, understanding why women break the law and offering rehabilitation to prevent them from committing more crimes is an effective way to improve public safety.

Gender responsive programming in San Francisco will also include services for men, Still said, including employment assistance for fathers struggling to pay child support.

Photo by Marc Soller via Flickr.

By Shellie Branco

Counties have no choice but to do things better than the state.

That’s what Kern County officials are saying as they prepare for an influx of low-level offenders from state prisons. They’re hoping to be more successful when it comes to helping offenders successfully integrate into society.

The U.S. Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population, as overcrowding had resulted in poor medical care for inmates. In April, Gov. Jerry Brown responded by signing into law Assembly Bill 109, or The Public Safety Realignment Act. Under this law, 34,000 low-level offenders will be redirected to the counties over the next two years. Beginning Oct. 1, counties will be responsible for low-level offenders whose last committing charges were not for violent or sex-related crimes.

Kern County Chief Probation Officer David Kuge expects to get jurisdiction over 1,100 to 1,200 offenders who would otherwise have been sent to state prison. He said he understands the community’s concerns about public safety.

“Somebody could’ve committed a sex or violent offense, but went to prison this time on second-degree burglary, and they will be released back to us,” he said.

The county’s incarceration system will become a revolving door, he added, with overcrowding leading to early releases for inmates.

“I think it was a poorly written law because there are still a lot of questions unanswered,” Kuge said. “It’s going to increase the danger to the public because we just don’t have the resources to do what we need to do.”

Jim Waterman, director of Kern County Mental Health, said counties will end up just like the state — broke — if they don’t come up with appropriate support, including substance abuse programs, that will get prisoners back on their feet. The bill requires counties to use programs that have evidence to back up their effectiveness.

“We absolutely have to find rehabilitative programs that work and get people out of the criminal cycle,” he said.

The state is providing realignment funding to counties based on the number of low-level offenders they’ve sent to state prisons. Kern’s share is $10.8 million to start, then $14.7 million annually.

County leaders have been meeting to discuss how to parcel out this funding, though they’ll have to pare down their wish lists substantially to meet the limited budget. A 14-member committee with representatives from the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, probation, mental health, the district attorney’s office and more will vote on the plan Sept. 21, then send it to the county Board of Supervisors. Departments will re-evaluate their needs in the months following and alter plans accordingly.

Kuge said his department likely will need $7 million of the $14 million county allotment. The state has provided his department start-up funds to purchase vehicles and equipment. Kuge plans to increase the number of probation officers and staff, but the department’s ranks have dwindled over the past few years, and it’s uncertain whether new hires will ease the burden.

The main focus is providing programs in education, job readiness and substance abuse counseling. County departments plan to find contractors for these services where possible, and they’re open to partnering with religious organizations.

“Lots of these guys will come back to the community without a job, and we’ll try to get them prepared for that,” Kuge said. “And it’s not just finding a place, it’s getting them mentally prepared because they’re not used to getting up every day like you and I, getting to work on time, getting to work five days a week. It’s not just job placement, it’s job readiness.”

The sheriff’s department has asked for $5.2 million to roll out its plan in three phases, said Chief Deputy Kevin Zimmermann. First, the department will add 238 beds to the existing 2,400 beds at four jails, and use an electronic monitoring program, both funded with over $600,000 in startup funds from the state.

“We’re going to fill these 238 beds rather quickly, so we’re looking to move into other programs as soon as possible,” Zimmermann said.

In the second phase, which could start in late October or early November, the department will expand its work release program, where supervised offenders would report to work sites in the community. The department will create a day reporting center with assistance from community partners, where offenders would attend anger management classes and drug counseling. Officials are also interested in contracting with Cal Fire or creating a local version of fire camps to put offenders to work.

“County jails, historically, have not been in the behavior modification business beyond in-custody education programs with general education and anger management, so because of this new program, we’re going to explore all options,” Zimmermann added.

On the mental health side, Waterman said his department will start with existing substance abuse programs and other services, using its current network of contracted providers to serve Kern’s large geographic area. Care starts the moment the offender gets out of prison.

“We do a lot of practical support,” Waterman said. “When they arrive, they don’t have IDs or a place to stay. They burn their ties with family or their social support system, so we provide a lot of that up-front support so they can make it in the community.”

The department will try to gain as much funding as possible for substance abuse treatment and find ways to order individuals into such programs.

Another option is an early release program. An individual who’s getting substance abuse treatment in jail would be released with an electronic monitor, under the condition that he or she will participate in drug counseling.

The department is also trying to carve out funding for offenders with mental illnesses so severe that they can’t be kept in the prison’s general population. Those individuals are the most expensive to treat, Waterman said.

Mental health’s portion of funding has yet to be determined. Waterman’s requests exceed available dollars, and it will be difficult to decide where to cut. He doesn’t expect a flood of patients on Oct. 1, but he’s concerned about the burden on the county’s already strained mental health system.

“If you think about an additional 100 individuals coming out of prison with schizophrenia, that’s an unstable population, so I’m really thinking this is dramatically going to impact our treatment system,” he added. “We will continue to do the very best with the resources we have.”

Recidivism is especially high for offenders with mental illnesses, Waterman said.

“The common scenario for a mentally ill individual leaving prison is to be dropped off at a train station and given 200 bucks, and local drug dealers know when they’re getting dropped off,” Waterman said. “By the time they get to Bakersfield, they’ve already spent the money on drugs, and they’re back on the streets. It takes them a few days to recidivate and go back.”

“It’s not a pretty picture if your son is caught in this loop,” he said. “It’s pretty maddening.”

Dana Toyama, a spokesperson for the state prison system, said any convicted felons who are determined to be a Mentally Disordered Offender will still go to state prison. Counties will not be receiving this level of inmate. But Waterman said many inmates who fall short of this designation still have mental health issues that are an obstacle to their successful placement back in the community.

Note: An earlier version of this story said the state would be releasing 34,000 low-level inmates. Actually, responsibility for that many newly sentenced inmates will be transferred to the counties over the next two years.

A New Way of Life founder Susan Burton (left) and Bobbie Annette Leigh in the backyard of one of the group's re-entry homes in the South LA community of Watts

By Robin Urevich

In California, many prisoners who are released from jails and prisons can’t go home to parents or spouses because of rules that bar ex-offenders from living in public or subsidized housing.

But those zero tolerance policies may be changing – at least in Los Angeles where the city housing authority has approved what is likely the first pilot program in the state aimed at reuniting ex-offenders and their families who live in Section 8 housing.

“We don’t want to consign people to homelessness and recidivism,” said Peter Lynn, who directs the Section 8 program at the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles.

The pilot program is expected to take shape in the coming months just as LA and other California counties struggle with a huge shift of non-violent, non-serious, non-sex offenders from state prison to county jail, and from state parole to county probation. The move is aimed at reducing prison overcrowding.

In the first year of the transfer Los Angeles County expects to either jail or supervise on probation 9,000 people who previously would have been sentenced to state prison or released on state parole.

“We want to see what we can do to assist with the re-entry of folks,” Lynn said.

Making a new life is tough for ex-offenders. It’s even harder without stable housing, said Susan Burton, who runs A New Way of Life, a live-in program that helps women transition from prison to life on the outside.

“Usually they don’t have a safe place. If they’d had one, they wouldn’t be there [in prison] in the first place,” Burton said.

Burton knows first-hand how hard life after prison can be. She served six prison terms over 25 years before finally getting help, and later founding A New Way of Life

“My son was accidentally killed …It was at the height of the crack epidemic,” she explained. “I started drinking and I ended up using drugs. I didn’t know how to deal with my grief.”

She recalls that after being released she would stay up for nights on end because she had no place to sleep.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation estimates that some 6.5 percent of parolees are homeless, but Burton said inadequate housing is a huge issue —along with mental health, education, job training.

“Can you imagine working out of your car?” Burton asked. “You have to have rest, a sense of security, clothing, showers, meals.”

Burton calls the new housing authority initiative groundbreaking.

The federal government also backs it. Last June, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan sent a letter to the nation’s public housing authority directors urging them to consider allowing ex-offenders to rejoin family members in subsidized housing.

The Oakland Housing Authority has set aside 12 apartments for formerly incarcerated women who’ve completed a re-entry program while in county jail.

But, most big housing authorities in California have no immediate plans to change their policies.

“We just want to keep the residents safe,” said Linda Martin, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Housing Authority explaining why the city housing authority generally bars people with criminal convictions for five years, while exercising some discretion in individual cases.

San Diego, Riverside, Sacramento and LA County have similar rules in place.

However in Sacramento, housing authority spokeswoman Angela Jones says her agency is aware of Donovan’s letter and uses discretion on a case-by-case basis.

Housing authorities in Santa Clara County, Oakland, and Fresno note that they are permitted to bar applicants with past criminal convictions, but don’t necessarily do so.

“It’s a complicated issue for residents,” said Catherine Bishop, a San Francisco-based attorney with the National Housing Law Project, noting that residents are usually the biggest opponents of relaxing rules that bar ex-offenders, because their safety is a big concern.

She notes that nationally, public housing rules toughened 15 years ago when then-President Bill Clinton advocated a One Strike and You’re Out policy in his 1996 State of the Union address. Tenants who dealt drugs or committed crimes should be evicted after a single offense, Clinton argued.

But Bishop said some housing authorities are rethinking the tough-on-crime approach.

New Haven, New York City and Chicago are either implementing programs that allow some ex-offenders in, or are considering such initiatives.

HUD Secretary Donovan’s letter notes, “this is an Administration that believes in second chances….Part of that support means helping ex-offenders gain access to one of the fundamental building blocks of a stable life – a place to live.”

In the city of LA, the pilot program would waive a bar against a still-to-be-determined number of ex-offenders with convictions in the past three years. Ideally participants would be identified before their release and would be required to join a re-entry program, Lynn said. And no one could be forced to take in a family member who’d been to prison.

“It’s very important to us that we don’t destabilize families in the program,” Lynn said.

At one of A New Way of Life’s homes, a sunny two-story on a residential street in Watts, 51-year old Bobbie Annette Leigh said she was released from prison in Chowchilla five months ago and went to live with her boyfriend who has a Section 8 voucher. But a few months later, he asked her to move because of the ex-offender prohibition.

“He said before they find out, I had to leave,” Leigh said. “We didn’t break up. We just parted.”

At A New Way of Life, Leigh is getting help with mental health issues and job searching. Once she strikes out on her own, LA’s new program could afford her an additional option she didn’t have when she was first released from prison.