Prison reform needs reform

Prison reform needs reform
Corrections system can't do task alone
- Mark Martin, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau


Sacramento -- When Roderick Hickman abruptly quit his job as California's top prisons official last month, a chorus of critics chided him for bungling the effort to turn around one of the nation's most dysfunctional law enforcement agencies.
In two years on the job, Hickman had infuriated nearly everyone involved in state corrections. The politically potent prison guards union charged that violence inside prisons had risen under his watch and ridiculed him almost daily on an Internet blog popular with prison employees. Inmate advocates, meanwhile, suggested Hickman said all the right things about reforming the system but ignored basic problems -- one lawyer noted that while Hickman organized a bureaucratic revamping of the department that included a name change, doctors at San Quentin State Prison went without a sink to wash their hands in between seeing patients.
But the consensus that Hickman failed to enact real change misses a key point that illustrates problems both with California's prisons and its politics. To truly fix what's broken behind bars in this state, experts say that the governor and Legislature -- not the head of the corrections system -- need to take action.
"In essence, we're blaming the wrong person for the prison problem," argues Joan Petersilia, a nationally-known corrections expert at UC Irvine. "Prison reform can't really happen inside prisons."
Scholars such as Petersilia who have studied California's overcrowded, $8 billion corrections system have repeatedly concluded that many of the system's troubles stem from poorly thought out criminal justice policies.
Sentencing laws enacted more than 30 years ago, and repeatedly described as a failure, require nothing of inmates, who sit in cells or on yards instead of entering drug treatment or vocational education programs. Corrections administrators have little power to determine when an inmate is truly ready to leave prison, and that results in the daily release of dangerous people back into the neighborhoods they previously terrorized. Overburdened parole agents are required to monitor virtually every parolee, leaving the agents little time to concentrate on the parolees most likely to pose a threat to citizens. That has resulted in this shocking fact: More than 20,000 California parolees are unaccounted for on any given day.
"The decision of who should come out, when they come out and how they are controlled while they are out is not really determined by corrections officials," said Petersilia, who recently finished a lengthy report detailing problems with the state's prisons. "All of those decisions are made by legislators and the body politic."
And many scholars say lawmakers continue to make bad decisions based more on headlines and emotional pleas than on a growing body of data that suggests how states can run cost efficient and effective prisons and parole systems.
Petersilia noted that instead of major policy reforms enacted in other states that have cut costs and not upped crime rates, California lawmakers continue to enact piecemeal changes to the criminal justice system. That approach is sometimes referred to as "drive-by policymaking." Between 1984 and 1991, for example, California lawmakers and governors enacted more than 1,000 crime bills imposing new charges, sentences and parole policies.
Rarely are costs -- or studies showing effectiveness -- considered. The results make working in the state's penal system difficult and contribute to parolees churning in and out of jam-packed prisons.
Officials with the state's prison guards union said one law enacted last year by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that restricts where some sex offenders can live has been a nightmare for parole agents, who struggle to place parolees.
Another recent law stripped parole agents of any discretion when a felon convicted of two strikes violates any condition of parole: he or she is automatically sent back to prison for a short stint behind bars instead of allowing the agent and other corrections officials to determine if some other program, such as substance abuse treatment, might be better.
No policy has been attacked more repeatedly than the state's main sentencing law, yet there has been little will in Sacramento to change it.
Enacted by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 1976, the so-called determinate sentencing reform required judges to implement predetermined sentences for most crimes. It was a radical change. Most inmates previously had been given undetermined sentences and then, before securing their release, were required to prove to parole officials that they had worked in prison to change their habits.
Now inmates know when they enter the system exactly when they'll get out. Even if the state's corrections officials launched an initiative to create scores of new programs inside prisons, inmates could simply ignore them and do their time.
"A guy knows he'll get out, and he doesn't really have to try and do anything to turn his life around," said Lance Corcoran, an executive with the prison guards union.
Even Brown called determinate sentencing "an abysmal failure" when speaking in 2003 to the state's Little Hoover Commission, and numerous studies -- including one commissioned by Schwarzenegger in 2004 -- have called for change. Corcoran also said "determinate sentencing needs to be looked at."
To understand how the sentencing law impacts public safety, look no further than Richard Allen Davis.
Davis became the poster child for the state's three strikes law in 1993 when he kidnapped and killed Petaluma's Polly Klaas. But he is also a symbol for problems with sentencing.
Before the Klaas case and before the sentencing law was changed, Davis had been in prison and was denied release on parole six times. Under the new sentencing law, Davis had to be released after a predetermined time, regardless of whether anyone felt he was ready. He kidnapped Klaas four months after leaving prison.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, scores of states around the country followed California's lead in rewriting sentencing laws. But virtually all of them have rewritten those laws during the last decade, according to Petersilia. Thirty-five states now give parole boards significant powers to decide who should get out, which she contends can change prison culture.
Not California.
In Sacramento, policymakers have flirted with creating a sentencing commission to revamp the state's laws, but no group was formed.
The study commissioned by Schwarzenegger -- which was chaired by former Gov. George Deukmejian -- suggested adapting a sentencing reform that would allow a judge to impose a minimum term and a maximum term. Corrections officials would allow an inmate out after serving the minimum term if the inmate completed programs designed to help steer him away from crime.
Schwarzenegger has never mentioned that reform.
The problem, many prison reformers believe, is a combination of the emotions attached to crime issues and the difficulty a polarized Capitol has in enacting any kind of thoughtful reforms.
Few in Sacramento, for example, would argue that the state's educational funding law, Proposition 98, isn't overly complex and in need of change, but debates over that devolve into disputes about whether lawmakers are for or against children.
Criminal justice issues descend to the same lowest common denominator.
Democratic Assemblyman Mark Leno of San Francisco was attacked earlier this year as a danger to society by some Republicans for opposing a ballot initiative that would shuttle virtually all sex offenders to rural areas, rather than cities. These new requirements on where offenders can live are based on scant evidence of any real benefit to public safety.
"There's no compelling reason for a sensible debate," noted Dan Macallair, executive director of the San Francisco Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. "Crime issues seem to do little else in Sacramento but attract political posturing."
E-mail Mark Martin at markmartin@sfchronicle.com.