NEWSMANDATORY MINIMUMS

The painful budget cuts on the horizon in California could have an upside for criminal justice reformers.

When new California Governor Jerry Brown announced $12.5 billion in proposed state funding cuts last week, he included a call to close the state's juvenile prison system by 2014. Community based alternatives to incarceration have been shown to reduce crime and long-term recidivism (in Missouri, for example), and Brown's proposal would move California in that direction. This is progressive leadership, and Brown deserves congratulations for raising the dialogue on juvenile justice alternatives.

But the deal is far from done. The state legislature holds the keys to the budget, and the Ella Baker Center launched a petition on Change.org calling on state lawmakers to keep this critical cut in the final budget. The Baker Center has advocated for this reform for seven years, and wisely points out in this blog post that Brown's announcement "is not merely a victory of activists and politicians. The real champions are the mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles that would not give up on their children or our state."

Brown's proposed budget, however, does not mess with another costly, wasteful pillar of the state's justice system: the death penalty. The ACLU of Northern California is calling on Brown to raise the abolition of the death penalty to his budget plans, potentially saving taxpayers more than $125 million per year (plus $400 million on a ridiculous proposed new death row). Sign the ACLU's petition here.

Voters head to the polls tomorrow across the U.S., and while control of Congress and support for the Tea Party have been the focus of media attention, 30 new governors will be elected and countless state legislatures are up for grabs.

These state offices will determine the future of our criminal justice policy, and if you believe the "tough on crime" blather you hear in stump speeches and TV ads, you might be expecting a new prison-building boom after the polls close. But with state budgets still in dire straits, we're more likely to see compromise and continued reform as the grandstanding fades and the real work begins.

In an insightful article last week at The Crime Report, Steve Yoder wrote on the criminal justice policies we're likely to see implemented by the largest new class of governors in 40 years, and found that they could go either way.

Deborah Fleischaker of Families Against Mandatory Minimums told Yoder that she didn't expect a huge post-election swing toward tough-on-crime, saying: “I think sometimes people say things in campaigns before they really understand the full scope of the problem."

Missouri judges are looking at the cost of sentences before they hand them down, including the costs prison imposes on taxpayers as one factor in determining a sentence. A few years from now, we'll probably be shocked that we didn't try this until 2010.

It's not a drastic move, despite the reaction of some prosecutors. The dollar figure that a judge sees is just one of many numbers in a report, but it's a wise inclusion and one that could change the way our criminal justice system works -- if it survives the knee-jerk reaction it's already causing.

The New York Times reported this weekend on the move by Missouri's sentencing commission to put these numbers in the hands of sentencing judges. When a judge is determining a punishment, he or she reviews recommended sentences and options, statistics on the likelihood of recidivism (which is a bit troubling, more below) and estimates of the cost of each sentence recommendation.

The tool is available to the public - I gave it a try, creating a fictional man convicted of his second armed robbery. The system suggested that he gets between 10 and 20 years. Ten years cost $145,027 and the bill for 20 years is twice that -- nearly 300 grand. If that doesn't make a judge think twice about the value of that extra ten years and the purpose of the sentence (punishment vs. vengeance vs. rehabilitation) then I don't know what will.

The Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission says judges have been asking for this data -- and it simply responded to the request.

“This is one of a thousand things we look at — about the tip of a dog’s tail, it’s such a small thing,” Judge Gary Oxenhandler told the Times. “But it is almost foolish not to look at it. We live in a what’s-it-going-to-cost? society now.”

All signs suggest that we’re on the verge on real, lasting criminal justice reform. But one human instinct is holding us back: an aversion to admitting that we were wrong. It’s time to admit that the War on Drugs was a failure, that tough-on-crime cost us billions and didn’t actually reduce crime and that short sentences might work just work better than long sentences.

But first we need to admit that things got off the rails a bit.

Peter Neufeld, the Co-Director of the Innocence Project (where I work when I'm not blogging here), told Slate recently that a leading reason we’ve seen so many innocent people spend years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit is that prosecutors, judges, police officers, forensic analysts and others don’t want to admit that they were wrong.

The same holds true for governors, policymakers, corrections experts—and taxpayers. If we could admit that our criminal justice policy since the 1970s has unnecessarily built the world’s largest and most wasteful system, maybe we could move on.

This week, newspapers in Indianapolis and Orlando made convincing calls for state leaders to reconsider the harsh sentences that have bloated prisons and budgets. The human propensity to avoid change and to avoid admitting mistakes is a powerful one, however, and it’s the last thing standing in the way of reform.

A must-watch new video from Reason.tv checks in with UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman, who shares in a short seven minutes his philosophy on preventing crime through a system that guarantees short, consistent sentences for crimes. I hope policymakers are listening.

Kleiman is one of the leading thinkers on criminal justice reform in America today, and his ideas are worth a look. I don’t agree with everything he says, but his plan to reduce the American prison population significantly through short, sure sentences is right on target. Severe sentences are the enemy of swift sentences, he says, because we use so many resources to hand down a 25-year sentence, when a one-year sentence could have the same impact.

“It’s a little strange that the people who are loudest about opposing wasteful government spending haven’t noticed that 25-year sentences are wasteful government spending,” Kleiman says.

If you read one article about the criminal justice system this year, make it this one from the Economist. If you read dozens of articles a day about this issue, make sure this is among them. Forward it to friends. Post it to Facebook. It's that good.

You're still here? I hope you have the Economist piece open in a tab.

Okay, here's why I like this piece so much.

Here at Change.org, we cover the American criminal justice system from many, many different angles and perspectives — but rarely do we (or anyone else for that matter) bring the whole system into focus in 3,000 words.

We write about the drug war and absurdly long sentences. We write about parole and alternatives to incarceration, juvenile justice, mental health, solitary confinement, wrongful convictions, private prisons, the list goes on. The beauty of the Economist piece — "Too many laws, too many prisoners" — is that it takes a step back, looks at the system as a whole, touches briefly on many central problems and paints a big picture of the disastrous system that readers will remember.

Thousands of people from across the United States are calling Senate leadership today to support the creation of a national criminal justice commission. Will you join them?

As we've written before, Sen. Jim Web's proposed commission is a key step for criminal justice reform in this country. And the good news is that legislation backing the creation of such a bipartisan panel is gaining steam in both the Senate and the House. Already, the Senate version, S. 714, has more than three dozen co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle.

Today's call-in day is already a success. Since I first started working on this post, I got word that the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Majority Whip Richard Durbin have heard our voices loud and clear and asked us to stop calling.

So now we're turning our attention to Sen. Mitch McConnell (the minority leader) and Sen. Jon Kyl (the minority whip). Please take a few minutes to make these two calls today. Talking points and phone numbers are here.

A group founded by the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to advance individual liberty and limited government — seems like a great vehicle to end America's mass incarceration problem, right? Unfortunately, if their list of top issues is any guide, Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas' Liberty Central completely overlooks criminal justice issues and the prison-industrial complex.

Ms. Thomas made quite a stir launching Liberty Central, which the Los Angeles Times describes as "a tea-party-linked group that could test the traditional notions of political impartiality for the [high] court." Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, is a long-time conservative operative with ties to the extreme right.

As Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy observes,the group's new "Founding Principles" webpage declares that Liberty Central identifies "limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, national security, and personal responsibility" as their top principles. Those principles, too, underline the drug reform movement. Doug, for one, writes that they "greatly inform my own deep concern with the huge growth of government and restrictions on individual liberty that result from modern US criminal justice policies, especially with respect to the war on drugs and mass incarceration."

Despite Liberty Central's stated abhorrence for how government deprives individuals of liberty, the group's site makes no mention of the millions incarcerated in our expensive and ineffective criminal justice system. The nine "Hot Issues" listed on the group's new site include what Liberty Central calls "dangerous" health care reform, government spending and how our children are being raised to "disdain free enterprise," whatever that means. But what about government over-spending on a prison system that actually deprives individuals of liberty — most of them for non-violent offenses?

Oklahoma lawmakers are trying to expand criminal penalties with one hand while cutting prison costs with the other. And the results won’t be pretty.

Bills to create 26 new crimes have been proposed in the state legislature this year, and meanwhile lawmakers are hoping to expand sentencing on 19 more offenses. Meanwhile, those same state leaders have proposed...cutting corrections costs by 7.5%. You might wonder: what can Oklahoma possibly be thinking?

OK's impossible dual goal is getting pushed by shallow tough-on-crime politics, which have already thrown the state's system into disarray. Prisons director Justin Jones says he currently has prisoners sleeping in classrooms and three to a cell. “If there’s a recipe for disaster, we’ve got all the ingredients cooking right now,” Jones told the AP.

No kidding. But that's not exactly something lawmakers want to hear. “The key in Oklahoma is that we don’t pay for a lot of preventive services that will save you on prison costs later on,” Jones went on. Bingo. (Wait, was that the sound of a prison director losing his job?)

Last year, even as states across the U.S. saw their prison populations fall, Florida was an outlier — one of the few whose population actually climbed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the state's incarceration rate is the third-highest in the nation, with spending on corrections accounting for fully 11% of the state's budget.

What's the matter with Florida?

One glaring issue is the state's policy of mandatory minimums, which — like many other states — Florida passed during the 1980s, when fear over drugs and crime had reached a fever pitch. In recent years, many states and the federal government have eliminated or adjusted their mandatory minimum laws. Gradually, officials have realized that mandatory minimums amount to little more than a costly, ineffective Band-Aid. But somehow, Florida missed the memo. Tell Florida lawmakers to reevaluate their state's mandatory minimums using the petition below.

In Florida, mandatory minimums apply to everything from drug laws to probation violations. Say you're caught with an illegal bottle of prescription drugs like hydrocodone or oxycodone. It doesn't matter whether you have a clean criminal record, a drug problem, or a chronic pain condition. The judge is required to sentence you to 25 years in jail. (Hardly a way to cure addiction, much less take so-called dangerous criminals off the streets.)

The only conditions under which Florida judges can adjust the sentence is if