Mixed views on closing two Pennsylvania prisons in neighboring counties

What has turned out to be one of the more controversial pieces of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2025-2026 budget proposal was never mentioned during his 90-plus minute speech laying out the spending plan this past week, according to the Pennsylvania Capital Star.

In budget documents, the governor proposed closing two Pennsylvania prisons, which his office says could save the state $100 million per year. He also proposed closing two community corrections centers for another $10 million in annual savings. The Shapiro administration has said falling incarceration rates in Pennsylvania make the closures possible. 

But the proposal has drawn varied reactions. The prison guards’ union has come out strongly against it, though the Department of Corrections said in an email to employees that all current workers would be able to hold on to a job with the same pay if they choose. Advocates for prisoners in Pennsylvanians have expressed cautious optimism that the move could improve lives in prisons, depending on how it’s done. And some lawmakers who represent districts with prisons in them have expressed concern about the economic impacts on nearby communities. 

The Department of Corrections says the specific facilities have yet to be chosen based on the recommendation of a “steering committee.”

‘Depends on how it’s executed’

Whether or not the move improves conditions for inmates by increasing access to rehabilitative programming and avoiding overcrowding in part depends on the durability of the trend of decreasing incarceration, as well as how the prisons slated for closure are chosen. How the plan is enacted could also have major impacts on communities with economies that rely on those prisons.

“Anything depends on how it’s executed,” said Claire Shubik-Richards, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, a nonprofit that offers support services for incarcerated Pennsylvanians and their families, including prison monitoring, transportation for visitation and mentoring. 

In theory, Shubik-Richards approves of the idea to close the prisons.

“Most states, including Pennsylvania, have seen the footprint of their state prison population shrink,” Shubik-Richards said. “So this is really, I would say, belatedly keeping with a national trend.”

Both locally and nationally, prison populations have fallen since the COVID-19 pandemic saw many non-violent offenders released over health concerns. And the lower incarceration numbers have stuck. That’s led states like Illinois and New York to close prisons in the last few years.

In Pennsylvania, the state’s 23 prisons collectively hovered around 100% capacity before the pandemic, with some individual facilities overfilled. But the latest state Department of Corrections monthly population report paints a different picture, with facilities operating at just over 82% capacity. According to the Department of Corrections, there are more than 37,000 people in the state’s 23 prisons and one boot camp on any given day, and monthly reports show that number is often higher by thousands.

Jill McCorkel, a professor of criminology and sociology at Villanova University, said this is in part because of releases during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also because of a bipartisan trend of support for legislation rolling back war-on-drugs era policies that started to stem incarceration rates in the late 2000s and 2010s.

At the time, America’s prison population was growing explosively, and increasingly costing taxpayers. Ethical and cost concerns brought together lawmakers and advocates on both the left and the right. Groups as disparate as Americans For Prosperity, a political advocacy group funded by The Koch brothers, and the American Civil Liberties Union can often still find common cause pushing laws intended to reduce mandatory sentencing laws around the country that were born out of the crackdown on drug use in the 1980s.

Shubik-Richards said she believes the lower incarceration numbers are here to stay, barring a “large external shock.”

But there are other considerations the Department of Corrections and the governor should take into account, she said. Right now, most Pennsylvania prisons are facing a severe shortage of reintegration-focused programs, whether those are educational, vocational or dealing with mental health and substance abuse issues. Consolidating staff at fewer facilities, Shubik-Richards said, could be one way to improve the situation. But that will depend in part on how many specialized staff can be retained.

And importantly, one of the best predictors of post-incarceration success for inmates is whether or not their families are able to visit them behind bars according to Shubik-Richards and other advocates. Numerous academic studies support a small to moderate reduction in recidivism associated with family visitation. Shubik-Richards wants any decision on which facilities to close to take into account the population centers where detainees are coming from. 

Philadelphia and Allegheny County residents make up the largest share of the state’s prison population.

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America's obsession with life in prison

The Sentencing Project: 

Before America’s era of mass incarceration took hold in the early 1970s, the number of individuals in prison was less than 200,000. Today, it’s 1.4 million; and more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences – one out of every seven in prison. More people are sentenced to life in prison in America than there were people in prison serving any sentence in 1970.

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Pennsylvania considers compensation for wrongfully convicted

Being incarcerated is a life-altering experience. If you’re the imprisoned person, trying to reassemble your life after serving your debt to society can take years, if not decades. If you are the survivor of a crime, you also often face years of recovery.

But what about the wrongly imprisoned? The data are a matter for pause, reports John L. Micek of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint effort between the University of California Irvine, and the University of Michigan and Michigan State University’s law schools, 161 people were exonerated in 2021, with each person losing an average of 11.5 years of their lives.

Instances of official misconduct  occurred in at least 102 exonerations in 2021. Fifty-nine homicide cases — 77 percent of murder and manslaughter exonerations in 2021 — were the result of official misconduct, the data showed. And Pennsylvania accounted for seven of those exonerations last year, the registry’s 2021 report showed.

Now, two Pennsylvania lawmakers are asking their colleagues to back a bill that would provide some redress to the wrongfully imprisoned by allowing them to seek compensation for the years they’ve lost behind bars.

“When an individual is wrongfully convicted and incarcerated the consequences are devastating not only to them but their families and friends,” Reps. Frank Ryan, R-Lebanon, and Regina G. Young, D-Philadelphia, wrote in an Aug. 25 memo seeking sponsors for their bill.

“Individuals are not only deprived of their liberty, but they miss holidays, birthdays, and other important life events,” they continued. “They undoubtedly will suffer negative economic and professional consequences as well.”

The average “cost” of a wrongful conviction is an estimated $6.1 million, or $1,334 per-day of incarceration, according to a 2021 paper by Vanderbilt University Law School professor Mark Cohen.

Right now, 38 states, Washington D.C. and the federal government provide some kind of compensation or payment to the wrongfully convicted, according to data compiled by The Innocence Project.

In their memo, Ryan and Young argue that Pennsylvania, one of 12 states without a compensation statute, should enact its own law “to ensure that exonerated individuals are appropriately compensated for the liberty they have been denied and given the necessary resources and services to succeed after being released from their wrongful incarceration.”

Under their proposal, a person seeking compensation must show “by a preponderance” of the evidence that they:

• “Were convicted of a felony.
• “Were sentenced to incarceration based on the conviction and they have served all or any part of the sentence.
• “Did not commit the crime that resulted in the conviction or there was no crime committed.
• “Received either a pardon, that the charges were dismissed following reversal, or that they were acquitted upon retrial after the conviction was reversed or overturned,” and
• “Were not convicted of any lesser included offense arising from the same transaction as the crime for which they were originally convicted,” Ryan and Young wrote.

If someone successfully proves all those things, the proposal calls for them to be awarded damages based on how long they were incarcerated and how long they spent on parole.

Tough on crime Texas, for instance, provides “the wrongfully convicted $80,000 per year and an annuity set at the same amount,” according to The Innocence Project.

And, in addition to any monetary compensation, “these damages can include child support an individual may have incurred while they were incarcerated, reasonable attorney fees, and compensation for any reasonable reintegrative services and mental and physical health care costs they incurred,” the two lawmakers wrote.

And, they added, “this legislation also provides various services, resources and assistance for individuals who are wrongfully convicted regardless if they are seeking compensation.”

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ABA Adopts Ten Principles to Reduce Mass Incarceration

The House of Delegates took aim at mass incarceration at the ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago, as reported in the ABA Journal.

Resolution 604 adopts the ABA Ten Principles on Reducing Mass Incarceration and urges all legislative and governmental bodies to implement policies consistent with these guidelines. According to the Working Group on Building Public Trust in the American Justice System, which sponsored the resolution, the principles build on existing ABA policies related to sentencing, pretrial detention, and court fines and fees; and they outline crucial steps that jurisdictions can take to fully reform their criminal legal systems.

In moving the resolution, Robert Weiner, the chair of the working group, pointed out that the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of its incarcerated individuals.

Weiner added that those in U.S. prisons and jails are disproportionately people of color, citing statistics showing that one of every three Black men born in 2021 can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives. He noted that this disrupts families, perpetuates poverty, leads to discrimination in hiring and hinders upward mobility.

“The current system of mass incarceration is costly, ineffective, unfair, racially discriminatory, socially destructive and legally infirm,” Weiner said. “It is time we tackle this problem.”

The working group includes the following in its 10 principles:

• Limit the use of pretrial detention.

• Increase the use of diversion programs and other alternatives to prosecution and incarceration.

• Abolish mandatory minimum sentences.

• Expand the use of probation, community release and other alternatives to incarceration, and create the fewest restrictions possible while promoting rehabilitation and protecting public safety.

• End incarceration for the failure to pay fines or fees without first holding an ability-to-pay hearing and finding that a failure to pay was willful.

• Adopt “second look” policies that require regular review and, if appropriate, reduction of lengthy sentences.

• Broaden opportunities for incarcerated individuals to reduce their sentences for positive behavior or completing educational, training or rehabilitative programs.

• Increase opportunities for incarcerated individuals to obtain compassionate release.

• Evaluate the effectiveness of prosecutors based on their impact on public safety and not their number of convictions.

• Evaluate the effectiveness of probation and parole officers based on their success in helping probationers and parolees and not their revocation rates.

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Overturning Roe v. Wade could lead to further mass incarceration

The NACDL published a report last August warning the public that, without the legal protections under Roe v. Wade, thousands of abortion laws could lead to a new chapter of mass incarceration, reported NPR. 

The invasion of privacy alone is a big concern to the NACDL. Anyone who needs or wants an abortion outside of the legal limits of their state is not only a target for criminal charges, but risks implicating others, too — by confiding in friends or family, crossing state lines for procedures, or even using a transportation app to get to an appointment. 

"Not just fines. We're talking about prison time," Wayne said. "We're talking about minimum mandatory sentences — aiding or abetting someone who gets ultimately charged with manslaughter or murder, which is a life sentence."

And for those who think a future of mass incarceration is too unlikely, Wayne points to the War on Drugs, starting in 1971. 

"Suddenly people who were being prosecuted for small amounts of drugs were now involved in larger and greater conspiracies with minimum mandatory sentences," Wayne said. "People were looking at life sentences and still remain incarcerated to this day. You have to ask yourself, what lessons did we really learn?"

Who will actually pay the price?

The NACDL has tens of thousands of members. Actual feelings and opinions on abortion vary within the organization, as expected. But that's not what this collective red alert is about.

Wayne says that despite a range of personal views, the membership as a whole is concerned about invasion of privacy, government overreach, and a massive stretch on legal resources if a wave of abortion-related criminal charges hits the U.S.

And that pain won't be distributed equally.

"Whenever you're talking about overcriminalization, you're talking about money," Wayne said. "Rich people will always be able to lawyer up. They will always have access to attorneys. Poor people will be left behind." 

She points to an already overwhelmed public defender system, which people can't access until after their legal troubles have started.

"I don't get a lawyer, if I'm poor, until I'm actually charged with a crime in this country in most jurisdictions," she said. "So I have to wait until that moment until I get charged. If I have money, access to counsel, I get advice on the front end of being able to perhaps avoid the consequences that I would face if I didn't have money."

The perfect victim

A future without Roe v. Wade ultimately leads back to that courtroom and jury, where the task at hand becomes navigating perception. The burden of being "the perfect victim" is nothing new when it comes to cases of harassment, sexual assault and domestic violence. 

"To be a perfect victim of sexual assault, human trafficking or intimate partner violence, you cannot also struggle with addiction, poverty or mental illness," wrote Amanda Rodriguez, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Baltimore's rape crisis center, TurnAround Inc, in a 2021 op-ed for the Baltimore Sun. "To be a perfect victim, you cannot accept a drink, engage in commercial sex or walk alone at night. You cannot wear tight clothes or have a criminal record. You cannot be human."

Except with a criminalized abortion, the "victim" isn't pressing charges. They're fighting them.

"At the end of the day, it's going to be the bias going into the courtroom," Wayne said. "The bias dealing with the district attorney who has preconceived notions of their own about how these cases should be prosecuted, the judges who oversee these cases and how they feel — and then ultimately go to the jurors' bias."

And that's a main focus of NACDL's training at the moment: preparing to help clients who have been charged with abortion-related crimes look sympathetic and relatable to a group of their peers (wherein the degree of difficulty varies, depending on your race.)

But in some cases, that might not be enough. While more than a dozen states have trigger laws that would immediately go into effect if Roe is lifted, restrictive abortion bans already exist in many states — some without exceptions for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. And the Supreme Court might be about to grant state lawmakers the freedom to ban abortion however they want.So when a jury is asked to determine whether someone broke a law post-Roe, even a "perfect victim" might still be a guilty one.

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Reversing mass incarceration through federal incentives

America’s criminal legal system is rooted in the nation’s history of legalized slavery and racial oppression, according to The Brennan Center for Justice. Our current system of punishment is still founded on a basic conception of outsider-hood that continues to create and perpetuate racial, ethnic, and class inequality. Criminal legal reform efforts must engage directly with this sordid lineage to unmoor the inequitable impacts and outcomes of our current system of “justice.”

As Cornell William Brooks, former president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, wrote: “Communities of color are over policed, over-prosecuted, over-incarcerated and yet underemployed.” The racial disparities throughout our criminal legal system are considerable. For example, one in three Black men are incarcerated in their lifetimes compared to one in 17 white men. When it comes to policing, these disparities are even greater, as evident in the number of Black men and women who are killed without justification by law enforcement officers. A mapping of police violence illustrates that Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police officers than white Americans, while nearly twice as likely to be killed as a Latinx person. Black Americans are also about 30% more likely to be unarmed in fatal interactions with police than white Americans. 

Can the federal government do anything to transform the American criminal legal landscape and reduce racial disparities? This is a genuine question. So many of these challenges exist at the local and state level. For instance, local jails and state prisons account for 91% of the nation’s incarcerated population. To put it just a bit differently: There are about 2.2 million people behind bars in this country, but only about 175,000 of them are in federal prison. Additionally, there are more than 10 million admissions in and out of the nation’s colossal network of local jails each year; more than 4.5 million people on probation or parole; and more than 70 million people have conviction histories that subject them to lifelong consequences to their lives and livelihoods. And when it comes to policing, there are 18,000 local police departments dotting the United States.

Yet still, the federal government is uniquely situated to incentivize systemic reforms for state and local-level criminal legal systems.

Consider the many forms that federal involvement in local criminal justice affairs can take. Federal agencies can and do enforce federal law against localities. For example, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorneys’ offices have the statutory authority to bring civil rights actions against corrections agencies and local police departments in addition to criminal prosecutions against individual officers to enforce federal rights law when police violate those rights. And through the federal government’s grantmaking powers, it can shape state and local criminal justice policy.

Federal funding schemes have long encouraged states to focus their resources on law enforcement interventions to deal with social problems, often resulting in our government locking up ever more people for ever longer periods of time. This has resulted, in part, in today’s bloated carceral state. In fact, since the 1960s, the federal government has played a central role in shaping the nation’s criminal justice landscape through outlays of grant money to states. For decades, federal grants encouraged states to increase arrests, prosecutions, and imprisonment. Federal funds have supported the expansion of local jails, including paying jails to house federal incarcerated individuals as well as ICE detainees.

One example of how federal dollars incentivized the growth of the carceral state that only exacerbated racial disparities is through the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (The 1994 Crime Bill), which authorized incentive grants to build or expand correctional facilities. Grants totaling $12.5 billion were authorized for incarceration, with nearly 50% earmarked for states that adopted tough “truth-in-sentencing” laws that required people to serve substantial portions of their custodial sentences. Other examples over the last half century include the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act of 1968, which provided $400 million for law enforcement purposes; and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which increased federal funding for law enforcement to fight the drug war. Then in 2005, when reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), Congress created the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program (JAG). All 50 states, territories, and more than 1,000 local governments rely on JAG dollars, whose funding level for the entire program averages between $300 to $500 million yearly. Those dollars support almost any criminal justice activity covered by the federal statute, yet about 60% of state-level JAG dollars support law enforcement and corrections functions. In his 2013 book, “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces,” journalist Radley Balko encapsulated this crime fighting incentive well: “As local police departments were infused with federal cash, members of Congress got press release fodder for bringing federal money back to the police departments in their districts.”

The federal government should no longer subsidize mass incarceration and should instead incentivize states to reverse the era of excess punitiveness and shrink the carceral state. One powerful way to do so would be for the president to champion and Congress to pass the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act (RMIA) to unwind these incentives by ensuring that federal grants are sent only to states that reduce incarceration. Designed to undo the damage inflicted by federal policies incentivizing states to lock up more people and to lock them up for longer periods of time, the RMIA would establish a grant program rewarding states for lowering their prison populations.

For states to obtain funding under the RMIA, they would have to submit plans describing how they would reduce incarceration; the RMIA would set an across-the-board reduction target for all states to meet. The grant would encourage states to take numerous steps to undo mass incarceration, like changing sentencing laws, establishing new programs diverting people away from the system, or improving wraparound services for individuals reentering their communities after incarceration. Leaders on both sides of the political spectrum all agree: The United States must end mass incarceration, which highlights and exacerbates racial inequality in America’s criminal punishment system. And we believe the RMIA can serve as a vehicle for reigning in state prison populations, while vastly reducing racial disparities in the system.

As calls for racial justice continue ringing in the air, the federal government should use its powers to realize the humanity, equality, and dignity of all. Black and Brown people deserve more. And anything less threatens to make our justice system anything but.

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Allegheny County's slate of eight reform candidates for judge

In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, a group of judge candidates known as the “Slate of Eight” are running on a promise to scale back the reach of the criminal legal system and promote alternatives to incarceration in the 1.2 million person county, which includes Pittsburgh, reported The Appeal.

Their campaigns for seats on the County’s Court of Common Pleas—the primary trial court for criminal, civil, and family cases—could bring overwhelming change not only to that court but also to lower courts whose procedural rules are set by Common Pleas judges.

“This is an opportunity to be transformative in terms of how our courts look, how our courts feel for the public, and the types of policy reforms that can be implemented,” said Tiffany Sizemore, a professor at Duquesne University School of Law and former public defender who is part of the Slate of Eight. 

The Slate of Eight moniker comes from grassroots racial justice organizations that teamed up to decide who to endorse out of a pool of more than 30 candidates. The groups are planning to mount major volunteer mobilizations on behalf of their chosen candidates in the run-up to the May 18 Democratic primary. 

Nicola Henry-Taylor, Lisa Middleman, Mik Pappas, Zeke Rediker, Giuseppe Rosselli, Chelsa Wagner, and Wrenna Watson round out the slate; most are criminal defense lawyers or former public defenders. Organizers supporting the slate say they chose these candidates because of their commitment to reforms like reducing the use of cash bail, curtailing long sentences, diverting drug cases, and limiting the involvement of minors with the criminal legal system.

“The slate candidates all understand how mass incarceration is one of the leading issues in this country, that the issue of mass incarceration is a national embarrassment,” Wasi Mohamed, a founding organizer with UNITE, one of the organizations that endorsed the slate, told The Appeal: Political Report. 

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GateHouse: ‘Law and Order’ and American politics

Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse Media
September 4, 2020

President Donald Trump delivered a campaign speech this week at an airport hangar in Latrobe, Pennsylvania and boasted about his commitment to “law and order.”

The president said Democrat Joe Biden wants to “surrender your nation to the radical left-wing mob” that includes rioters and looters who have burned businesses and “attacked law enforcement” during recent protests, reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Trump’s law and order rhetoric is not new. He argued during his 2016 convention address that Barack Obama had “made America a more dangerous environment for everyone” and declaring himself “the law and order candidate.”

The GOP law and order strategy goes back more than 50 years.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater, the GOP nominee for president, introduced campaign operatives to the concept of crime as a divisive, hot-button issue and America has never been the same. Goldwater used the civil rights movement, protests and riots to promote a sense of lawless black communities. Although Goldwater was thrashed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, later candidates saw value in crime and race as a political tool in American politics.

When Richard Nixon was making his second bid for president in 1968 the Civil Rights Act had passed, riots had erupted in cities across the country after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and murder rates had increased 50% since 1950. Race relations were tenuous, at best, and Nixon knew it. Crime control became a surrogate for race control.

The conservative mantra of “law and order” also worked for Ronald Reagan. His “War on Drugs” single-handedly created an explosion in incarceration. The Reagan administration’s disparity in punishing the use of crack cocaine, predominately used in the black community, and powder cocaine, predominantly used in the white communities, subjected black men and women to much harsher sentences.

For half a century before 1964, prison population had remained stable at about 110 inmates per 100,000 people. Since then, that number rose to 480 inmates per 100,000. Today, African Americans make up 12.6% of the general population and 43% of the prison population.

In 1988, when crime rates were soaring, George H.W. Bush clobbered Michael Dukakis with Willie Horton - a racially charged commercial attacking Dukakis for his state’s prisoner furlough program.

Even Democrats got into the law and order business. During Bill Clinton’s first campaign violent crime was at its peak and easily exploited. According to Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow, during Clinton’s 1992 campaign he vowed “He would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he.”

Alexander pointed out that Clinton’s attack on racial minorities was even more insidious, ”(Clinton) slashed funding for public housing 61% and boosted corrections 171%, ‘effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.’”

Joe Biden does not have clean hands when it comes to “law and order.” According to the Washington Post, some criminal justice experts say Biden’s collaboration with segregationist senators like Jesse Helms “helped lay the groundwork for the mass incarceration that has devastated America’s black communities.”

Trump has been more aggressive in his rhetoric on race and crime. The word “thug” has a negative racial connotation. Trump has referred to “Black Lives Matter” protesters as thugs.

In 2015, following the death of African American Baltimore resident Freddie Grey and city-wide protests, Trump tweeted, “Our great African American president hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.” As president he labeled Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested, dangerous and filthy mess” and claimed that “no human being would want to live there.”

Unfortunately, this is not a national debate about crime rates or police funding. This is about the politics of racial division and fear.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino. 

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American Journal of Public Health dedicates issue to criminal justice and mass incarceration

This supplement issue examines the public health concerns surrounding mass incarceration, with research and perspectives on improving health outcomes for justice-involved populations, psychological distress in solitary confinement, the links between mass incarceration and climate change, the public health implications of criminal justice reform, and more.

The American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) is dedicated to the publication of original work in research, research methods, and program evaluation in the field of public health. The mission of the journal is to advance public health research, policy, practice, and education.

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GateHouse: The unintended consequences of mass incarceration

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

January 31, 2020

America leads the world in incarceration with roughly 2.2 million people currently in prisons and jails nationwide - a 500% increase over the last 40 years.

Nearly two-thirds of those in prison are people of color. In fact, black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated as white men. There is a one in three chance that a black man born in 2001 will end up incarcerated during his lifetime, according to the Sentencing Project.

An increasing concern is the number of women incarcerated. Since 1980 the number of women incarcerated has jumped by more 750%.

The impact on those incarcerated is obvious. However, the impact of incarceration reverberates beyond prison walls. Kristin Turney, a University of California-Irvine sociologist wrote that the impact on children of incarcerated parents is “an overlooked and unintended consequence of mass incarceration.”

Turney’s research in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior compared children under age 18 with similar socioeconomic characteristics and family backgrounds and found that having a parent in prison or jail was linked to poor health; ADHD; behavioral or conduct problems; learning disabilities; anxiety; and developmental delays.

The scope of the problem is significant. Between 50% to 75% of incarcerated individuals report having a minor child. According to the National Institute of Justice, the number of children who have experienced parental incarceration at least once in their childhood may range from 1.7 million to 2.7 million. If this estimate is on target, 11% of all children may be at risk.

The economic impact on families of incarcerated parents is profound. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary wage-earner in their family. Many families affected by incarceration were already economically disadvantaged.

The increased economic stress on families impacted by incarceration is due to several factors. One is the extra expenses incurred by families trying to stay connected with a parent or loved one in prison. A partner on the outside is often saddled with legal fees, the loss of an additional income or their own job loss stemming from increased work/childcare conflict. They must then somehow deal with new costs such as exorbitant prison telephone fees, travel costs - often great distances - to visit incarcerated partners, and the desire to support loved ones with supplies and money. Financial strife is one of the most frequently cited sources of stress or strain among partners of incarcerated individuals.

Incarcerated mothers are also an alarming problem. According to the Sentencing Project, the number of incarcerated women increased from a total of 26,378 in 1980 to 225,060 in 2017.

Nearly two-thirds of mothers in state prisons were living with their children prior to their incarceration. The separation of mother and child can be quite dramatic for both parent and child. To further exacerbate the problem many of those mothers were single parents. The children of those women are now uprooted from their home, often with limited contact with their mothers. According to Eric Martin of National Institute of Justice, the research on children of incarcerated mothers suggests “a host of negative child outcomes, including poor academic performance, classroom behavior problems, suspension, and delinquency.”

As estimated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the annual cost of incarceration in the United States is $81 billion. That figure addresses only the cost of operating prisons, jails, parole, and probation - leaving out policing and court costs, and costs paid by families to maintain relationships with loved ones.

In a new report, the Prison Policy Initiative found that mass incarceration costs state and federal governments and American families $100 billion more each year than previously thought.

Setting aside the enormous costs, policymakers should consider what has been achieved by the explosion of incarceration over the last half-century - and its negative impact on children and parents alike?
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

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GateHouse: Risk assessment under scrutiny in criminal justice system

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

August 2, 2019

Over the past two decades as crime rates fell and incarceration rates rose some have argued, according to University of Virginia Professor Brandon Garrett, “that one way to begin dialing down ‘mass incarceration’ without simultaneously jeopardizing the historically low crime rate is to put risk assessment back into sentencing.”

According to Garrett, risk assessment in sentencing is not a new phenomenon. In California, more than a century ago, lawmakers introduced indeterminate sentencing - whereby an offender is given a minimum sentence and maximum sentence and is only released from prison after the minimum, and prior to the maximum, upon demonstrating that he or she is a low risk for reoffending.

It has recently been estimated that at least 20 states have begun to incorporate risk assessment into the sentencing process “in some or all cases.”

However, this week, 27 leading criminal justice researchers signed a letter denouncing the use of sentencing risk algorithms in courtrooms across the country. They report the tools’ reliance on distorted data does little to reduce jail populations and unfairly penalizes minority defendants, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

The letter suggested that current risk assessment instruments are unable to distinguish one person’s risk of violence from another. In statistics, predictions are made within a range of likelihood, rather than as a single point estimate.

Some predictive algorithms appear to make estimates of recidivism accuracy at between 5 and 15%, where studies have demonstrated that predictive models can only make reliable predictions about risk for violence within ranges of 20 to 60%.

The letter continues, “As a result, virtually everyone’s range of likelihood overlaps. When everyone is similar, it becomes impossible to differentiate people with low and high risks of violence. At present, there is no statistical remedy to this challenge.”

As far back as 2014, then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder warned that risk assessments might be injecting bias into the courts. At the time, he called for the U.S. Sentencing Commission to study their use. “Although these measures were crafted with the best of intentions, I am concerned that they inadvertently undermine our efforts to ensure individualized and equal justice,” he said, adding, “they may exacerbate unwarranted and unjust disparities that are already far too common in our criminal justice system and in our society.”

According to a recent report by the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, “using risk assessment tools to make fair decisions about human liberty would require solving deep ethical, technical, and statistical challenges.” The report found that tools currently available and under consideration by jurisdictions across the country fail to adequately address those concerns.

In Pennsylvania, the Board of Probation and Parole, the agency charged with making parole decisions, uses various assessments including risk, sex offending, mental health and drug and alcohol. Risk assessments tools coupled with parole guidelines are thought to provide uniformity to the board’s decision making process.

Just this past April, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said, “Pennsylvania can lead the nation with bold bipartisan reforms to probation and parole.”

Within three months, according to WHYY-FM, parolees from Pennsylvania prisons committed six murders.

The first, on May 23, a parolee allegedly strangled his girlfriend’s mother, then set her home in Hershey on fire to cover it up.

On June 29, police say another parolee murdered his girlfriend’s two-year-old daughter in Baltimore, Maryland. About a week later, a parolee from New Castle, just north of Pittsburgh, allegedly murdered his girlfriend’s eight-year-old son.

On July 14, 2019 an off-duty Pittsburgh police officer was shot and killed, allegedly by a parolee. Just four days later, another parolee allegedly stabbed his sister and niece in Lancaster.

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel told WHYY-FM, “Listen, I think in every way we need to use data, measure it, infer what we can from the actual data, learn what we can from individual cases, and not knee-jerk.”

Predicting human behavior is a tricky business. While it may have a place in the criminal justice system, blind adherence to predictive tools can have deadly consequences.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Incarceration down slightly, US retains largest known incarcerated population in the world

For all the talk of curbing America’s appetite for mass incarceration and bipartisan support for reducing prison sentences, the number of people incarcerated in the United States declined only slightly in 2017, according to The New York Times. 

The United States still has the largest known incarcerated population in the world.

“If we keep working on the kinds of criminal justice reforms that we’re doing right now, it’s going to take us 75 years to reduce the population by half,” said Rachel Barkow, a sentencing expert at New York University School of Law and author of “Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration.”

Like others who study the United States prison population, Ms. Barkow saw the significance of Thursday’s report not in the decline itself, but in how minor it was.

“The kinds of reforms we’re seeing now are really modest,” she said. “I’m glad were getting them. But this is not transformative yet.”

Slightly under 1.5 million people were in prison at the end of 2017, a slight decrease from 2016 but still a population that, if gathered in one place, would be one of the largest cities in the country.

County and city jails held around 750,000 inmates in mid-2017.

Combined, the United States would remain the world’s leader in incarceration, according to data collected by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London. It is unclear, though, exactly how many people are held in detention in China, a country with a similarly high prison population.

The incarceration rates for both jails and prisons in the United States have declined by more than 10 percent over the past 10 years, the federal report found. (Prison is for people serving sentences longer than one year, while jails typically hold those awaiting trial or sentencing, or those serving shorter sentences.)

The decline in the prison population is not connected to the crime rate, which has fallen steadily over the past decades. Instead it is it the result of policy changes and court orders, and has been markedly uneven.

A drop in the federal prison population, due in large part to a 2014 decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to reduce sentences for drug crimes, accounts for a third of the year-over-year decline. And while some states have significantly reduced their prison populations in recent years, others continue to set records for the number of people they are keeping locked up.

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Dallas DA implements policies to end mass incarceration

Dallas DA John Creuzot is unveiling a list of reforms that he calls “a step forward in ending mass incarceration in Dallas County,” reported the Texas Observer. The new policies, which he outlined in a 5-page public letter, range from refusing to prosecute certain drug cases to reforming probation and changing how the office handles crimes related to poverty and homelessness.

“The criminal justice system has fallen disproportionately harshly on poor people and people of color, that’s just a fact,” Creuzot told the Observer. “The entire system is complicit in this dysfunction. We’re doing what we can within this office to address some of that.”

Under the new policies, the DA’s office won’t prosecute people arrested with misdemeanor marijuana possession for the first time; Creuzot said he’s already dismissed more than 1,000 pot possession cases that were filed before he took office. After the first offense, Dallas prosecutors will offer a diversion program — a fine, a class and drug testing — that, if completed, will lead to dismissal of the criminal charge.

Among other changes, prosecutors will no longer take “trace” cases involving a minuscule amount of drugs, nor will they accept criminal trespass charges against someone who is clearly homeless and in need of services. Creuzot’s letter seeks to reduce the county’s heavy reliance on cash bail — the subject of an ongoing federal lawsuit — directing prosecutors to advocate for pretrial release in many low-level felony and most misdemeanor cases. “Our system of justice cannot depend on whether individuals can afford to buy their freedom,” he wrote.

Creuzot’s 5-page memo follows major reforms made by other so-called progressive prosecutors, whom advocates are pushing to change the system from the inside out. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner set the high bar last year by refusing to prosecute a wide range of crimes and changing how his office handles plea deals and sentencing. Last month in Boston, Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins issued a 65-page manifesto on “progressive prosecution” that focused on resolving nonviolent offenses without jail time.

“The entire system is complicit in this dysfunction.”

The changes in Dallas show how the movement to elect reformist DAs has evolved in Texas. The new policies go beyond reforms made during the first term of Harris County DA Kim Ogg, who was among an early wave of Democratic prosecutors elected in 2016. Ogg has since been criticized for continuing to seek high bail in misdemeanor cases and now faces a primary challenger from the left.

David Villalobos with the Texas Organizing Project, which rallied behind Creuzot and other progressive DA candidates in the midterms, says the new reforms in Dallas underscore how elections can quickly change policies on the ground that impact poor and marginalized people. That’s also exemplified by a Democratic sweep Harris County in the November election that dramatically changed the landscape for reform in Houston.

“We need people who can help us move away from an incarceration-first mentality,” Villalobos said. “These elections, they’ve given us the foundation for reform.”

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