Snyder: A new vision of how criminal JUSTICE might work

 Rachel Louise Snyder writes in The New York Times:

The avenues that lead women to jail tend to differ from those for men. Criminologists have long understood this. What happens with women is often a layering of trauma and abuse. They might have economic instability or mental health challenges that allow them to be exploited by violent partners. They might exchange sex for food or housing, and then get arrested for any number of infractions: prostitution, trespassing, drugs. The criminal-justice researcher Stephanie Kennedy calls these “crimes of survival.”

These avenues have contributed to shocking rates of incarceration for women: Between 1978 and 2015, the number of women in state prisons has grown by 834 percent. The overwhelming majority are primary caregivers. When a woman goes to prison, the downstream effects can be staggering: children might enter foster care, itself often a traumatic system. Aging parents might be put into subpar facilities, or have to find alternative care and housing. All too often, the cost of such upheaval results in a cycle of crime, incarceration, addiction, poverty and broken families.

Courts have long struggled with how to respond. The question is: Can we create a system of justice that looks wholly different from what most of us imagine when it comes to crime and punishment, while still demanding accountability from perpetrators? What if court were a place that afforded someone the opportunity for a complete reset, with entryways to jobs, housing, education? What if instead of punishing people who’ve been broken many times over, we helped to heal them?

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“Precrime" the claim that biometric technology can foretell crime

Sara Fathallah writes in the Inquest: In prisons and jails across the United States, authorities now use automated systems to transcribe phone calls and visitation videos and to flag words or phrases deemed risky. For decades, correctional facilities recorded and reviewed calls manually, but AI-driven systems now allow authorities to scan millions of minutes of conversations in real time.

In the 2010s, prisons began using a biometric technology called voiceprinting, which identifies individuals based on the unique characteristics of their voices. It allows correctional facilities to identify who is speaking on any given call and to search for other calls featuring the same voice. Texas-based Securus Technologies, one of the largest providers of prison phone services in the United States, supplies sophisticated voiceprinting services to hundreds of correctional agencies.

There is no scientific consensus on the validity of automatic speaker recognition, and experts recommend exercising extreme caution when using voice recognition as evidence in court. Even Securus’s 2016 patent acknowledges that “each given person’s vocal tract characteristics actually vary in a number of ways depending on time of day, how much the person has been talking that day and how loud, whether or not the person has a cold,” and other factors. But prisons continue to collect voiceprints and build growing databases; at least 200,000 voiceprints have been stored thus far. Sometimes, prisons pressure incarcerated people to give up their voice samples by threatening a complete loss of communications privileges to those who decline. In other instances, they enroll incarcerated people in voice recognition programs without their knowledge or consent. New York alone, for example, had already enrolled 92 percent of its incarcerated population by 2019.

In some jurisdictions, voiceprinting systems can be used to identify both incarcerated people and the individuals who speak to them. As representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation point out, such technologies can potentially be used to “profile anyone who has a voice that crosses into a prison, including all the parents, children, lovers, and friends of incarcerated people.” Advocates are afraid that authorities might flag individuals who are in touch with multiple incarcerated people, searching for patterns and ways to crack down on prison organizing.

Today, a growing array of wearable technologies—ankle monitors, bracelets that measure blood alcohol levels, smartphones themselves—are used to track people at nearly every stage of the criminal legal process.

A new generation of compulsory biometric devices, however, pushes far into dystopian territory, raising questions about how much biological information the carceral state feels entitled to collect. Some of these tools, already being tested in U.S. jails and prisons, take the form of rigid wristbands that monitor heart rate, skin temperature, cortisol levels, and so-called “activity” or stress indicators. According to the ACLU, they represent “not just a privacy invasion but an assault on inherent human dignity and autonomy.”

In some research initiates, the data gathered by biometric devices is already being analyzed and operationalized. In Indiana, a team of computer scientists and developers at Purdue University utilized such data in 2020 to train an AI algorithm to predict recidivism. According to the team’s press release, the project—funded by the Department of Justice and conducted in collaboration with county-level corrections and law enforcement agencies—harvested data such as stress and heart rates via wearable bracelets and smartphones. The stated goal was to determine which physiological indicators are linked to an individual’s “risk of returning to their criminal behavior.”

But as scholar Brian Jefferson notes in Digitize and Punish, algorithms used for carceral means are not “simply mathematical objects” but rather “artifacts of governance designed to achieve specific objectives.” By focusing on internal, physiological states rather than structural conditions—such as access to housing, employment, health care or social support—these models dismiss decades of work investigating recidivism and its social and economic causes. Those causes, as AI researchers Os Keyes and Chelsea Barabas have noted, are already well understood. What remains unsettled is why emerging technologies continue to search for answers inside the body, rather than in the systems that shape people’s lives.

Across these examples, a shared pattern emerges: the encoding of the body as evidence, often without the knowledge, consent, or recourse of those involved. This process strips people of their autonomy, dignity, and right against self-incrimination. Whether through DNA, eye movements, or physiological indicators of stress, these systems recast human bodies as sites of suspicion, deception, threat, or risk. Rather than eliminating human bias, they redistribute and reinforce it.

“Crime prediction algorithms,” Ruha Benjamin aptly explains, “should more accurately be called crime production algorithms.” Biometric tools are likely to expand further across the criminal legal system as police departments, courts, and prisons increasingly turn to A.I.-driven surveillance and predictive technologies. These tools are being deployed most aggressively in communities that are already heavily policed and disproportionately criminalized. Preparing for—and resisting—this expansion requires a broader understanding of biometrics beyond facial recognition alone, including the many ways bodily data can be collected and put to use. Fighting to ban facial recognition is not enough; it must be part of the larger fight to stop carceral biometrics and advance digital abolition.

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A review of discretionary parole systems

 Parole, the release mechanism which could significantly reduce the number of people behind bars, has reached a moment of reckoning. Dysfunctional in some states and banned in others, parole looks really different from state to state. But parole is a system worth having, if states can implement it fairly and broadly, reported the Prison Policy Initiative.

This two-part report builds out work we started with the MacArthur Justice Center, which resulted in a “North Star” document of Parole Principles. These principles establish a vision of what our parole systems should look like, knowing that every state’s system is different and each faces different political realities.

We set out to surface some of the overlooked aspects of discretionary parole, particularly the stages before a parole release decision is made. We wanted to know about how parole boards are composed and how they do their work, how parole applicants navigate through preparing for and having their hearing, and how policy and practice translated into the latest parole grant rates.

This report is meant to serve as an essential resource for lawmakers, advocates, journalists, incarcerated people, and others interested in starting a deep dive into their own parole system and identifying impactful reforms.

Part 1: How parole boards and hearings work

In this part, we examine parole boards in 35 states with discretionary parole — how they're formed, who is appointed to them, and how they carry out their work. We also look into how parole hearings work, such as whether they are public, or held in person. Our policy scan reveals that states take wildly different approaches to parole boards and hearings, most of which are unlikely to provide a fair, efficient process for those who are eligible or become eligible for release through reform.

Part 2: How parole decisions are made

In this second part, we dive deeper into parole grant rates and the decisionmaking guidelines and realities that lead to those rates. We filed public records requests and pored through publicly available reports and data dashboards to find the number of parole hearings and grants in 2023 and 2024. In absolute terms, every state with discretionary parole is granting release to fewer people each year, and many are holding fewer parole hearings in 2024 compared to five years ago.

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New Jersey Governor wants to reduce locking up technical parole violators

New Jersey officials would return potentially hundreds fewer parole violators to prison and cap how long they could be held under changes Gov. Phil Murphy will announce in his annual state of the state address next week, reported the New Jersey Monitor.

Murphy will urge lawmakers to pass legislation that would reduce how many people get hauled back to prison for technical parole violations, which is when someone violates the conditions of their parole rather than commits a new crime. Between 1,100 and 1,200 parolees are in state custody on any given day for technical parole violations.

“Right now, roughly 10% of our state’s entire prison population consists of people who are being held behind bars for committing a technical parole violation, like missing a scheduled meeting or forgetting to report a move to a new town,” Murphy is expected to say in his speech Tuesday afternoon at the Statehouse in Trenton. “Nobody should lose their freedom because of a technicality.”

The state Parole Board decides who is granted parole, under what conditions, and when, as well as whether to charge someone with a parole violation that will land them back in prison. Murphy included $1 million in the current state budget — which runs through June — for a consultant to examine how those decisions get made, although that work hasn’t yet started.

New Jersey law gives the parole board little discretion.

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What is next for Trump as he faces sentencing

Will Donald Trump avoid prison? It may depend partly on his ability to convince a probation officer that he would be “amenable to supervision.”

That’s according to Martin Horn, a former commissioner of both the New York City Department of Probation and the city’s Department of Correction, who spoke to POLITICO Magazine about the process Trump is about to undergo as he tries to stay out of the slammer.

In a typical case, a convict will be interviewed by a probation officer in the days after the verdict and be given the opportunity to accept responsibility and present mitigating factors that could reduce any sentence. That is going to be difficult for a man who has constantly railed against the case against him — not to mention the very judge who will decide the sentence.

Horn, who is a professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said a probation officer will have to answer: “Is this individual going to accept that he has been justly convicted and accept the strictures and restrictions and requirements of a probation sentence?”

That will be one of several key factors for Justice Juan Merchan to weigh before he announces his sentence for the former president-turned-convicted felon on July 11.

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New York Parole Board denies 60 percent of eligible prisoners with little explanation

Over 10,000 people appear before New York’s parole board each year. Hearings are often rushed, lasting an average of 15 minutes. Commissioners are afforded wide discretion in how they decide cases, with little oversight or review. They decide to keep around 60 percent of parole seekers in prison.

New York Focus and Bolts reviewed dozens of parole board decisions and appeals. The decisions run as short as a single paragraph, providing parole seekers little guidance on how to win their release. Many repeat variations of the same vague phrases when denying release, many lifted directly from the state’s parole statute. Applicants are often informed that their release “is not compatible with the welfare of society,” for example, without explaining how the board arrived at that conclusion.

“They’re not giving people any clarity about what they can do to obtain parole the next time,” said Michelle Lewin, executive director of the Parole Preparation Project. “They’re not giving individualized reasons for denials, despite the fact that their own internal regulations demand that they do so.”

The parole board’s lack of transparency creates difficulties for applicants of all stripes. But it especially burdens parole seekers serving lengthy sentences for violent crimes. Despite decades of incarceration, these individuals face the very real possibility of dying in prison, even if they have demonstrated sincere growth and rehabilitation.

“I think it’s time that we gave people a chance to be productive citizens,” said Assemblymember David Weprin, a Democrat who has introduced legislation to increase the parole board’s transparency, “especially in the case when they’ve shown that … they’re not the same individuals that they were when they committed the crime 20 years ago, 30 years ago.”

Advocates for reform have sought to strengthen board oversight from every angle: legislation like Weprin’s, direct pressure on Governor Kathy Hochul, and cases before the Court of Appeals.

Last month, Appellate Advocates, a non-profit organization of public defenders, argued before the state’s highest court that the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision should release the training documents it provides to board members. The documents include hypothetical decisions and sample language — all materials that parole advocates say could help incarcerated individuals understand how the board makes decisions and how to make the strongest case for release.

doccs has resisted, and argued in court that it should be allowed to shield the documents, in a dispute that has dragged on for over five years.

Jose Saldaña, the director of the Release Aging People in Prison campaign, described a similar experience with the board. He spent decades incarcerated in New York, in his case for the attempted murder of a New York City police sergeant when he was 27 years old. Though he had earned his associate degree and led several restorative justice and victim awareness programs, the parole board denied his release four times.

“We discussed these vague reasons … ‘Releasing you at the time would so deprecate the nature of the crime as to undermine respect for the law,’” Saldaña said. “What does that really mean?”

“Nobody knows what that means,” Steven Zeidman, director of the City University of New York School of Law’s Criminal Defense Clinic, told Bolts and New York Focus. Not even parole commissioners. Zeidman said commissioners apply the same language differently from one another, even when evaluating the same individual. “What’s the message to people inside preparing? How do you prepare?”

NEW YORK LAW requires board members to consider many enumerated factors in their decisions, but the commissioners frequently emphasize the nature of the parole seeker’s offense over their rehabilitation and growth while incarcerated. Their cases are often dismissed with terse lines like, “Your positive programming to date is noted.”

Reform-minded lawmakers have long supported Weprin’s bill, the Fair and Timely Parole Act, which would reduce the board’s opacity and limit some of the commissioners’ discretion. The legislation would eliminate the vague statutory language cited in board decisions and require commissioners to explain in “detailed, individualized, and non-conclusory terms” exactly why they decided to deny release. It would also require the board to issue a quarterly report that includes the reasons for each denial, which commissioners were assigned to each case, and how they voted.

The bill would establish a presumption that the board would grant parole once an applicant has served their minimum sentence. To deny release, parole commissioners would have to clearly articulate how a parole seeker threatens public safety.

Weprin first introduced the bill in 2017. Since then, three separate iterations have died in committee, where the 2023 version now sits. Dixon attributes the icy reception in Albany to upstate conservative legislators, whose constituents disproportionately benefit from employment opportunities in the prison system. “Upstate districts have a vested interest to keep this no-sense institution going,” he said.

Senator Patrick Gallivan, the chamber’s Republican minority whip, is a former parole commissioner who opposes the Fair and Timely Parole Act. His district encompasses Erie County’s Collins Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison employing hundreds of people. But he said his opposition to the bill has nothing to do with protecting upstate jobs.

Gallivan said the bill would limit the board’s ability to consider negative aspects of the parole seekers’ applications, such as their institutional records. He agrees with reformers that the Board of Parole has too much discretion — but he sees them stretching the rules to grant release, rather than keeping people in prison. Gallivan said that when he was a parole commissioner, he tried to set his biases as a former sheriff and state trooper aside and vote according to the law. He said he wants everyone on the board to do the same. Some commissioners say at their confirmation hearings that they will abide by the law, he said, but “the minute that they got sworn in, they said, ‘I don’t care what the law is. I’m here to release people and I’m going to.’”

Reform advocates have repeatedly called on Hochul to reform the parole system. As New York Focus and Bolts have previously reported, the board features zombie commissioners serving long past their terms have expired and a medical parole system that leaves most terminally ill people to die behind bars. The vacancies on the board have long afforded Hochul the opportunity to staff it with reformers. But Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative, said she does not expect Hochul to expend any of her political capital on the issue. Under Republican pressure, she noted, Hochul has supported other rollbacks to criminal justice reforms in recent years.

Hochul has pointed to fluctuations in crime and rearrest rates when backing down from other reforms. But Bertram claims that lenient parole policies don’t undermine public safety. She points to a federal study showing that people who commit violent offenses are the least likely to be rearrested after release. “The safest person you can release from prison is a murderer, especially someone that served 10 to 20 years,” said Bertram. “That’s just what the data shows.”

Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

FRUSTRATED BY New York’s legislative and executive branches, parole reformers have turned to the judiciary. The state’s courts have limited power to modify parole board decisions, but advocates hope they will at least compel the board to be more transparent.

At a November 15 Court of Appeals hearing, Appellate Advocates argued that the state’s Freedom of Information Law mandates the release of the board’s training documents.

doccs revealed the existence of the training materials in 2020 when they told Appellate Advocates they were withholding certain documents in response to a records request. Michael Higgins, assistant director of the University at Buffalo Law School Civil Rights and Transparency Clinic, says that administrative agencies routinely prepare interpretations of the law that govern what they do, but they often keep the interpretations secret. “Basically, they make up rules that are written down in their training documents or in manuals that the public can’t access,” he said. He says foil requires the release of those documents upon request.

At the hearing, doccs argued that foil does not extend to the training materials because a parole board lawyer prepared them, shielding them from disclosure under attorney-client privilege. (doccs declined to comment due to ongoing litigation.) Appellate Advocates countered that attorney-client privilege covers legal advice on real world scenarios, not abstract training documents.

While the Court of Appeals has shown signs of a leftward shift on some criminal-legal issues, it’s unclear whether the newly reconfigured court will flex its power on behalf of parole seekers. During oral argument, Associate Judge Shirley Troutman, a Hochul appointee, expressed concerns that ruling for Appellate Advocates would foist an “unreasonable burden upon trial courts” handling future disputes over attorney-client privilege. Even Chief Judge Rowan Wilson, the court’s liberal leader, said Appellate Advocates’ arguments had “frightening” implications for attorneys. The court scarcely touched on how its decision would impact incarcerated individuals.

For advocates like Dixon, obtaining the release of these documents would only be a first step. Achieving a truly transparent parole system would require wholesale changes, from data disclosure to board appointment procedures.

“The matrix itself needs to be dismantled,” Dixon said. “The system has to change because it is criminal what is happening.”

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Changes may soon be coming to Pennsylvania's probation system

Recently, a bipartisan reform package passed the upper chamber 45-4. Senate Bill 838 would make exiting the probation program easier for people who reach educational or employment goals. It would also end the practice of prolonging an individual's participation in the program for minor offenses, such as a traffic ticket, reported the Erie Times-News.

“I’ve said this before, and I will continue to say it — people deserve second chances,” state Sen. Anthony Williams (D-Philadelphia) said in a press release. 

Williams co-sponsored the bill with several fellow Democrats and Republican colleagues as well, including state Sen. Lisa Baker (R-Luzerne), chair of the Judiciary Committee, and state Sen. Camera Bartolotta (R-Washington), secretary of the GOP caucus. The four opposing votes came from conservative Republicans.

For likely dissimilar reasons, Senate Bill 838 is opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

"It continues to permit judges to stack probation sentences and to impose probation 'tails' — a term of probation imposed after a period of incarceration," the ACLU has written of the bill. "It fails to provide an automatic, or even efficient, way to terminate probation early — doing little to reduce the number of people under supervision."

Jessica Jackson, chief advocacy and operations officer at the REFORM Alliance, said this criticism ignores several substantial improvements to the system.

"A vote 'no' is a vote for the status quo," Jackson told the USA TODAY Network. "Did we get everything we wanted? No. But this is a compromise effort."

"This isn't the end of reforms in Pennsylvania," she added, "but it's an incredible first step."

The bill represents an evidence-based modernization of the system that's partly modeled after a successful York County pilot program implemented in 2016, according to Jackson. Stringent conditions — such as being confined to one county, prohibited from being in the presence of a felon and barred from being around alcohol — would no longer be automatically applied.

"We're limiting the number of things that a person could be incarcerated for under a technical violation," Jackson said.

The bill's fate is unclear in the lower chamber. Beth Rementer, press secretary for House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D-Montgomery), said the reform package is still under review.

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Robert Kennedy's assassin denied parole, again

California Gov. Gavin Newsom refused to parole Sirhan Sirhan the man convicted of gunning down Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, a brazen assassination of a presidential candidate that scarred the nation and altered the course of American politics during the turbulent 1960s, reported the Los Angeles Times.

A two-person state parole panel recommended in August that Sirhan Sirhan be paroled, influenced in part by two of Kennedy’s children, who have advocated for his release. Sirhan has been imprisoned for more than half a century since his conviction in Kennedy’s shooting death at the Ambassador Hotel the day after the senator won California’s 1968 Democratic presidential primary.

“Mr. Sirhan’s assassination of Senator Kennedy is among the most notorious crimes in American history,” Newsom said in a statement released Thursday afternoon. “After decades in prison, he has failed to address the deficiencies that led him to assassinate Senator Kennedy. Mr. Sirhan lacks the insight that would prevent him from making the same types of dangerous decisions he made in the past.”

Newsom, who as governor has the final say on Sirhan’s release, had appeared resistant from the outset.

The governor has said he has idolized Kennedy throughout his adult life. In recent months, he repeatedly told reporters that one of the few photographs on his desk shows Kennedy with his father, late appellate court Judge William Newsom.

Newsom explained his decision in an opinion article published in the Los Angeles Times. The governor said Sirhan still refuses to accept responsibility for the assassination of Kennedy despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, and remains a danger to society. He called Sirhan a “potent symbol of political violence.”

“Kennedy’s assassination not only changed the course of this nation and robbed the world of a promising young leader, it also left his 11 children without a father and his wife without a husband,” Newsom wrote. “Kennedy’s family bears his loss every day. Millions of Americans lost a unifier in a time of national turmoil and grief, just nine weeks after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and four-and-a-half years after the murder of Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy.”

On the night Gov. Newsom overwhelmingly defeated the Sept. 14 recall vote, he ended a subdued victory speech by quoting Kennedy: “Tonight I’m humbled, grateful, but resolved in the spirit of my political hero Robert Kennedy ‘to make more gentle the life of this world.’”

Sirhan initially was sentenced to death, but that was commuted to life imprisonment after California briefly outlawed capital punishment in 1972.

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Probation and parole needs an overhaul

 Community supervision — generally speaking, our systems of parole and probation — began in the 19th century as a peer-to-peer system of support, writes Peggy McGarry for the Brennan Center for Justice. Community members came forward to assure the court or prison that they could help those convicted of crime to live lawfully outside of jail or prison.

In 1841, for example, John Augustus, a Boston shoemaker, persuaded the court to release a man to his care, convinced he could cure the man of his drunkenness. When he was successful, the Boston courts began using community care to suspend criminal sentences. In 1876, Zebulon Brockway, the warden of the prison in Elmira, New York, prevailed upon the authorities to release to community care men whom he believed were “rehabilitated.” In the early 20th century, states and counties established formalized systems of support and surveillance as the population of cities and towns grew.

Despite the transition to government agencies with professional staff and budgets, the fundamentally supportive nature of those systems remained in place well into the 20th century. For people released from jail or prison, staff were available to “reintegrate” them, to help them with the problems that might have led to their crimes in the first place, and to see that they succeeded. Today, however, many of those agencies are more primed to find and punish failure than to promote success. The length of supervision and the nature of the conditions have grown more onerous and punitive, and the consequences of failure more severe.

So, we ask: what happened?

Civil rights, voting rights, and the Nixon administration

A focus on crime and “urban unrest” — code for fear of people of color — grew in the aftermath of the upheavals of the 1960s and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Faced with the potential for people of color having power, the policies and rhetoric of the Nixon administration, particularly its Southern strategy and “War on Drugs,” were aimed at making sure that they didn’t. The attention to crime, especially urban crime, was taken up by the media and by policymakers of both political parties at the federal and state levels. It led to the passage of harsher sentencing laws, including the recategorization of offenses to make them incarceration-eligible, criminalization of more kinds of behaviors, and longer terms of incarceration.

Prison and jail populations increased, and state and local budgets were hit hard. The era’s political rhetoric about race and crime made it much easier to consider those caught up in the system as “other,” rather than as members of the same community. Instead of an opportunity to restore lives, release on parole or probation became a privilege that could be taken away. Any violation, no matter how trivial, could be seen as an affront to the generosity and forbearance of the court or paroling authority.

The budget hits from the growth in incarceration and the building of more prisons and jails, with the assistance of nearly $3 billion in federal funding,  meant fewer dollars for community supervision: fewer staff, larger caseloads, less money for services and a variety of other things to help those released remain stable in the community. Agencies once structured to provide assistance were reduced to offering surveillance and enforcement.

The trend to punish harshly did not end with sentencing. Laws were passed at the state and federal levels that closed off many public benefits that had once been offered to the newly released, such as public housing and public assistance, making a successful term of supervision that much harder to achieve.

The changing nature of supervision

As “tough on crime” became the rallying cry in many political campaigns, and as federal and state legislatures and agencies made changes to laws and policies, the resulting climate affected the actions and decisions of both judges and parole boards. Worried about their elections and appointments, judges looked to longer terms and more rigid “standard” conditions of supervision as insurance. Although in recent years this has begun to change, governors often filled parole board positions with political allies with little education or experience in criminal justice. While they often make headlines for their release decisions, parole boards also determine the conditions of supervision and the responses to any violations of them.

Long lists of conditions — the rules for living while on probation or parole — have become the structure of supervision: surveil for adherence, punish for violation. Standard conditions do not address the specific needs of each person but impose the same rules of conduct on everyone. While some are sensible, most are controls on noncriminal behavior. “Do not associate with felons” — though the individual’s only place to live might be a family home or shelter also occupied by people with felony convictions. “Do not move your place of residence without permission from your parole officer” — though in the crowded housing of poor communities, frequent moves are more common than in society at large. “Do not consume alcohol” — though alcohol use may have been in no way connected to the individual’s crime. “Do not leave the county without prior approval,” curfews, frequent reporting, and random drug testing — even if the original crime had nothing to do with drugs. These are but a few of the common conditions, conditions that can interfere with a person’s ability to keep a job or fulfill family obligations like childcare.

Apart from standard conditions of release, the judge or parole board usually imposes additional requirements, including treatment, classes, electronic monitoring, and others. In many places, the person on supervision is expected to cover the costs of such programs or even the cost of the supervision itself. To someone struggling to find housing and employment, to keep a job or initiate family reunification, these fees can guarantee failure and reincarceration.

This is the result of the budget reductions for staff and services that arose from “tough on crime” rhetoric. Politicians denounced services to those on supervision that “regular” people could not get, while simultaneously pushing for a “mess up and you’re back” approach. With larger caseloads and fewer resources, officers had significant motivation to yank a “difficult” case — a person struggling to comply with conditions — and recommend revocation and a return to jail or prison. For a judge or parole board, that recommendation was easy to approve since it was politically safer than continuing a difficult case — even if the “difficult” circumstance was a noncriminal violation of conditions.

The transition to law enforcement

As the duties of probation and parole officers became more about surveillance and enforcement of conditions, rather than the original concept of community care and reintegration, the recruitment and training of new officers changed as well. They were no longer hired for their “helping” skills or orientation. In many places, new officers were trained alongside institutional corrections officers and law enforcement personnel. The focus of such training is on finding and responding to crime: surveillance techniques, use of force, use of firearms, how to subdue the “other.” Beginning in the mid-1980s, their unions and associations successfully lobbied for arming supervision officers. While these officers surely do encounter dangerous situations at times, their desire to be armed was driven mostly by the difference in the pay and benefits available to those in public safety. The subsequent arming of probation and parole officers completed the transition of those agencies from a service orientation to identification as law enforcement.

Without time and resources, with scant encouragement from their agencies, officers have little reason to work patiently with supervisees to help them stabilize and be successful. Officers are not given raises or promotions based on the successes achieved by people on their caseloads, and the decision to revoke someone back to jail or prison at the first sign of trouble is affirmed by how often their revocation recommendations are approved. It’s a process of circular reasoning: the judge, parole board member, or regional supervisor assumes that the officers in the field know best how to respond to violations; the officers assume their responses and recommendations are correct because the judge or parole board member approves them.

These problems have been exacerbated in recent years by the moves in states to reduce prison spending by making more people eligible for probation and parole. However, with more people eligible for release on supervision with longer terms, and as the resources — and the inclination — for effective and humane supervision have disappeared, revocation has become more frequent. According to the Pew Trust’s Public Safety Performance Project, between 2000 and 2018, 28 states increased the length of their probation sentences. And according to the Council of State Governments, 25 percent of prison admissions in 2017 were revocations from supervision.

Conclusion

A different approach to community care is critical if we are to make it a useful tool for preventing future crime and enhancing both family and community well-being. There have been many efforts in recent decades to change how paroling authorities make decisions, how supervision is conducted, and how revocations are handled. We know how to use officer time effectively to engage with the people on their caseloads, how to assess who needs more time and who can be left alone, how to intervene in ways that are helpful rather than punitive, how to encourage stability and success. And we know how to work with communities, religious organizations, health care and social service agencies to improve lives, rather than to destroy them.

But that change isn’t happening in enough places. We will continue to see these trends until we intentionally recruit officers who are more interested in prevention than enforcement, unless we invest in officer training that focuses on how to help those on supervision to succeed, unless we change our reward structure to incentivize those whose clients succeed, and unless we stop ordering long terms of supervision and onerous conditions.

We have not done these things primarily because we seem to be content to waste the lives of those who have broken the law. The damage we continue to do is of little concern to us. They are other. And, apparently, their lives don’t really matter.

 To read more CLICK HERE

New York sends more people back to prison for technical parole violations than any other state

New York State sends more people to prison for technical parole violations — like missing a curfew, failing a drug test, or being unable to secure employment — than any other state in the country, according to The Crime Report.

Not only does this have a lasting impact on the justice system, but it impacts taxpayers, as they are the ones that supply a large sum of the enormous reincarceration cost, according to a groundbreaking report released Thursday by the Justice Lab at Columbia University and The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform.

The latest report, titled The Enormous Cost of Parole Violations in New York, analyzes state department budgets, spending, and taxpayer dollars of 2019 to narrate how much money New York State is spending to incarcerate people for parole rule violations. It also analyzes how much money the state could be saving if they enacted reform.

The report  found that New York State spent $319 million in 2019 to incarcerate people for parole rule violations in state prisons. In addition, New York counties—excluding the five counties in New York City—collectively spent more than $91 million to jail people who were accused of technical violations. And New York City alone spent more than $273 million to jail people accused of technical violations.

That put the total cost to taxpayers at a “staggering” $683 million, the report said.

“New York State’s parole system is not only inequitable — it is also extraordinarily costly,” said Judge Jonathan Lippman, Commission Chair and Former Chief Judge of the State of New York. “Taxpayers are picking up the tab for a system that sends too many people to jail and prison for minor technical violations, rather than for committing actual crimes.”

Some advocates would argue that “too many people” is an understatement, considering in New York State alone, there are approximately 35,000 individuals under parole supervision on any given day.

Moreover, of the New Yorkers sent back to prison in 2016, 65 percent were reincarcerated for technical parole violations — like missing a curfew, failing a drug test, or being unable to secure employment.

What’s also striking is the clear racial disparity: “Black people are incarcerated in New York City jails for technical parole violations at more than 12 times the rate of whites,” the Less Is More NY campaign details.

All of this, researchers say, has an “enormous cost.”

“Currently, New York State is spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on locking Black and Latinx people up for minor technical parole violations — upending lives and harming communities with little to no benefit in terms of public safety,” said Vincent Schiraldi, Co-Director of the Columbia Justice Lab and former New York City Probation Commissioner.

Schiraldi continued, “Imagine what more New Yorkers could accomplish if our state stopped wasting money on incarcerating people for technical parole violations and invested in programs and services that have been proven to produce actual safety and community wellbeing.”

After analyzing the number of people reincarcerated for parole violations, the budget for the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the researchers calculated the annual cost to reincarcerate someone, as well as the annual cost to keep someone behind bars.

The researchers found New York State spent approximately $319,516,000 to incarcerate people for parole rule violations in 2019 — amounting to an average annual cost of $79,879 per incarcerated person.

To add to that, the researchers note that this doesn’t include the estimated and associated cost for benefits and pensions for DOCCS employees.

Extrapolating these numbers, the researchers estimate that New York taxpayers will pay over $6.8 billion over the next 10 years simply to incarcerate people for rules violations.

Because of the fixed cost it takes to run and operate a carceral facility, the researchers say the best way to keep costs down is to reduce the jail or prison population.

“Recent figures released by DOCCS suggest that reducing prison capacity by 1,200 beds is expected to reduce spending by $35 million, resulting in marginal savings of $29,000 per bed,” the report details. “These figures are consistent with previous DOCCS statements that eliminating 6,650 prison beds since 2011 saves $193 million annually.”

The authors add that these findings suggest to state policymakers that change must occur, and that the state government must reach out to make meaningful collaborations with communities that are already heavily impacted by this injustice.

Moreover, the funds should be reinvested into services, an idea that is gaining traction in legislative reforms.

The full report can be accessed here.

PEW seeks to improve outcomes for parole/probation agencies

According to a new report by The Pew Charitable Trusts, States Can Shorten Probation and Protect Public Safety, more than 3.5 million, or 1 in 72, adults were on probation in the United States at the end of 2018—the most recent year for which U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data is available—more than triple the number in 1980. Nationwide, on any given day, more people are on probation than in prisons and jails and on parole combined.

At its best, probation—court-ordered correctional supervision in the community—gives people the opportunity to remain with their families, maintain employment, and access services that can reduce their likelihood of reoffending while serving their sentences. But, as previous research by The Pew Charitable Trusts has shown, the growth and size of this population have overloaded local and state agencies and stretched their resources thin, weakening their ability to provide the best return on taxpayers’ public safety investments, support rehabilitation, and ensure a measure of accountability. One key factor driving the size of the probation population is how long individuals remain on supervision.

Although probation was originally conceived as an alternative to incarceration, criminal justice officials, policymakers, and other stakeholders increasingly acknowledge that keeping people on probation longer than is needed to deliver public safety benefits carries unnecessary and unproductive costs and wastes scarce resources. This report aims to help state and local leaders better understand and address the critical issue of probation length by providing essential data and offering policies and practices that can improve outcomes for probation departments and the people they supervise across the U.S. 

To read more CLICK HERE

Judge locks up girl during pandemic for failing to do homework

One afternoon in mid-June, Charisse (not her real name) drove up to the checkpoint at the Children’s Village juvenile detention center in suburban Detroit, desperate to be near her daughter. It had been a month since she had last seen her, when a judge found the girl had violated probation and sent her to the facility during the pandemic, reported ProPublica.

The girl, Grace, hadn’t broken the law again. The 15-year-old wasn’t in trouble for fighting with her mother or stealing, the issues that had gotten her placed on probation in the first place.

She was incarcerated in May for violating her probation by not completing her online coursework when her school in Beverly Hills switched to remote learning.

Because of the confidentiality of juvenile court cases, it’s impossible to determine how unusual Grace’s situation is. But attorneys and advocates in Michigan and elsewhere say they are unaware of any other case involving the detention of a child for failing to meet academic requirements after schools closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

The decision, they say, flies in the face of recommendations from the legal and education communities that have urged leniency and a prioritization of children’s health and safety amid the crisis. The case may also reflect, some experts and Grace’s mother believe, systemic racial bias. Grace is Black in a predominantly white community and in a county where a disproportionate percentage of Black youth are involved with the juvenile justice system.

Across the country, teachers, parents and students have struggled with the upheaval caused by monthslong school closures. School districts have documented tens of thousands of students who failed to log in or complete their schoolwork: 15,000 high school students in Los Angeles, one-third of the students in Minneapolis Public Schools and about a quarter of Chicago Public Schools students.

Students with special needs are especially vulnerable without the face-to-face guidance from teachers, social workers and others. Grace, who has ADHD, said she felt unmotivated and overwhelmed when online learning began April 15, about a month after schools closed. Without much live instruction or structure, she got easily distracted and had difficulty keeping herself on track, she said.

“Who can even be a good student right now?” said Ricky Watson Jr., executive director of the National Juvenile Justice Network. “Unless there is an urgent need, I don’t understand why you would be sending a kid to any facility right now and taking them away from their families with all that we are dealing with right now.”

In many places, juvenile courts have attempted to keep children out of detention except in the most serious cases, and they have worked to release those who were already there, experts say. A survey of juvenile justice agencies in 30 states found that the number of youths in secure detention fell by 24% in March, largely due to a steep decline in placements.

In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order in March that temporarily suspended the confinement of juveniles who violate probation unless directed by a court order and encouraged eliminating any form of detention or residential placement unless a young person posed a “substantial and immediate safety risk to others.” Acting on Whitmer’s order, which was extended until late May, the Michigan Supreme Court told juvenile court judges to determine which juveniles could be returned home.

Judge Mary Ellen Brennan, the presiding judge of the Oakland County Family Court Division, declined through a court administrator to comment on Grace’s case. In her ruling, she found Grace “guilty on failure to submit to any schoolwork and getting up for school” and called Grace a “threat to (the) community,” citing the assault and theft charges that led to her probation.

“She hasn’t fulfilled the expectation with regard to school performance,” Brennan said as she sentenced Grace. “I told her she was on thin ice and I told her that I was going to hold her to the letter, to the order, of the probation.”

That June afternoon, a month after the sentencing, Charisse left Children’s Village without seeing Grace, but she did pick up a shopping bag of clothes and toiletries she had delivered days earlier. She said officials had rejected them because they violated facility rules: underwear that wasn’t briefs; face wipes that contained alcohol; a pair of jeans deemed too tight.

Charisse counts each day they’re apart, and that was day No. 33. Another month has since passed, and there could still be months to go before they are at home together again.

To read more CLICK HERE

Rethinking probation and parole in the midst of pandemic

In the effort to release people from jails to stem coronavirus outbreaks behind bars, those jailed for probation and parole violations have been an obvious choice, reported The Marshall Project. They’re locked up not for committing new crimes but for breaking the rules of their supervision, like drinking alcohol, traveling without permission, or missing appointments. In New York alone, Governor Andrew Cuomo last week ordered the release of more than 1,000 such people from jails around the state.

These efforts spotlight the hundreds of thousands of people who are jailed each year for behavior that would be routine if they weren’t on probation or parole. Research has long called into question the public safety benefits of locking them up, and other traditional probation and parole tactics. Now social distancing orders to slow the virus are providing a way to test some changes critics have advocated. Fifty reform-minded probation and parole chiefs last week called for states and counties to “suspend or severely limit” jailing people for supervision violations that aren’t crimes, among other changes, in response to COVID-19.

One of them was Brian Lovins, president-elect of the American Probation and Parole Association. “This gives us a big opportunity to challenge the need for incarceration for non-violent folks,” he said.

With government buildings closed across the country, check-ins at parole and probation offices are all but suspended nationwide. Many departments are doing drug testing only in the most high-risk cases, according to a small New York University survey and interviews with people in the probation and parole field, known as “community corrections.” And with jails overcrowded and courthouses shuttered, some departments have stopped making arrests for breaking the rules of supervision—known as “technical violations”—unless there’s an imminent safety threat. Some places have formally ordered officers to stop bringing people to jail for technical violations. In others, fewer home visits and check-ins mean fewer opportunities for officers to discover broken rules.

To be sure, dialing back close pre- or post-release supervision is not without risk. Around the country, officers are using video and phone calls to keep in touch with people they supervise, but they lose some nuance and personal connection when they’re no longer in people’s living rooms, observing family dynamics, or visiting workplaces and having informal chats with whoever manages the person there, probation and parole professionals said in interviews.

Susan Rice, the chief probation officer in Miami County, Indiana, sees this time as a “big social experiment.”

“We all think we have to supervise these people and be drug testing them constantly and following them around. If we stop doing that, do they fall apart? Get rearrested? Overdose? Will it really happen or will we see that they’re fine?” she said.

Originally designed as an alternative to incarceration, probation and parole have instead become “a significant contributor to mass incarceration,” according to a 2017 Columbia University Justice Lab statement signed by more than 60 prosecutors and community corrections directors across the country. On any given day, supervision violations account for almost a quarter of people in prison nationwide—about 280,000 people—according to an analysis by the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center.

“This is what the research has been saying: just leave them alone,” says a probation chief in the upper Midwest, who asked not to be named so his staff don’t feel he is criticizing their usual practice. Even before the coronavirus crisis, his office had been trying to implement probation “dosing”—tailoring their support to the person’s risk and needs, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach.

“We probably still over-supervise when we don’t even intend to,” he said. With the current suspension, “I think there will be some ‘ahas’ coming out of that.”

Late last month, a Georgia man who’d recently had a double lung transplant was set to serve a year in prison for a probation violation, according to Michael Nail, the state’s commissioner of community supervision. “That’s the last person you want to be going into the prison system” under the threat of COVID-19, Nail said. Nail said he got a call from a local sheriff, who was anxious to have the man out of his jail but couldn’t get the prison system to take him. With a judge’s help, they arranged to have the man released on time served.

“There’s nothing out there that shows a specific amount of time in custody is the magic number” to address violations, Nail said. Coronavirus precautions are “an opportunity to educate folks on what the research shows.”

The pandemic has also suspended some of the social supports that are both lifeline and requirement for many on probation and parole, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, appointments with counselors and therapy groups. Some of those have been temporarily replaced by telehealth or video conferences. One probation officer in Westchester County, New York, said she spends her days on the phone, scrambling to help people sign up for unemployment or log in to virtual appointments. She asked The Marshall Project to withhold her name because, like several of the officers interviewed, she was not authorized to speak with a reporter.

Meanwhile, probation and parole caseloads are likely to rise in coming weeks as prisons and jails look for ways to reduce overcrowding. This week California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the state intends to release 3,500 prisoners to parole earlier than planned.

“We’re all kind of freaked out,” said a Missouri probation officer whose caseload is exclusively people with sex-offense convictions. Her state’s pandemic protocol calls for “high and very high risk” clients to be seen face-to-face just once per month; all others check in by phone. “Anyone that’s been around knows they can drug all they want, they can not report, they can abscond, and they’re not going back to prison right now,” she said.

But others say the rules were too strict to begin with.

One man on parole in New York said that when he heard officers were not issuing technical violations, he decided to fly out of state for a night to meet his newborn granddaughter. He asked not to be named because he was discussing a parole violation. He had only been out a few weeks after serving decades in prison, but decided to take the chance because he was afraid that once the usual protocols are back it will be years before he may get a travel pass, he said.

“I'm not going to follow all of their rules and then catch the virus—anything could happen—and then I die and I never met my granddaughter,” he said.

So far, crime appears to be on the decline in some cities, even with a coronavirus-related rollback in nonessential policing, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. Some of the decline can certainly be attributed to people hunkering down at home and other social distancing steps. But the numbers, although not yet conclusive, may provide reassurance to those who fear that releasing people from jail and easing supervision will lead to more crime.

In Massachusetts, the court has scaled back the number of people placed on electronic monitoring to limit the interpersonal interaction required to have the device fitted as well as non-serious violations that result from the devices, said Edward Dolan, the state’s probation chief. Massachusetts is only putting ankle bracelets on people for whom the state “couldn’t figure out a way not to do it.” This includes those convicted of stalking or domestic violence, Dolan said.

It shows how the coronavirus pandemic is forcing the justice system to “adjust its risk threshold,” Dolan said.

“It’s really a balancing between the impact of the pandemic, and what we’re willing to collectively tolerate as risk in the community.”

To read more CLICK HERE

Report analyzes recidivism rate of paroled juvenile lifers in Pennsylvania

A report released by Montclair University, Resentencing of Juvenile Lifers: The Philadelphia Experience, examined the recidivism rate of prior juvenile lifers now on parole.

In terms of risk to public safety, juvenile lifers can be considered low-impact releases. The   analyzed data from 174  releases  and  as  of  December  2019,  only 3.45 percent (n=6) have been re-arrested. Four cases were dismissed. The other two cases resulted in convictions, one for Contempt for Violation of Order of Agreement and one for Robbery, yielding a reconviction rate of 1.14 percent. The remaining 168 individuals (96.5 percent) have been living in the community for an average of 21 months (as of December 2019) without any known law enforcement contacts. In comparison, among persons convicted of homicide offenses nationally, an estimated 30 percent are rearrested within two years of release, a rate that is 8.72 times higher than that of juvenile lifers released in Philadelphia.

To read the full report CLICK HERE

PLW: Addressing the COVID-19 Pandemic in Pennsylvania’s Prisons

Matthew T. Mangino

The Legal Intelligencer

April 30, 2020

A week after the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) announced that a prisoner had tested positive for COVID-19, Rudolph Sutton died in his cell at the State Correctional Facility (SCI) at Phoenix in Montgomery County. Sutton, 67 years old, died from pneumonia caused by COVID-19. He was the first inmate, and as of this writing, the only state inmate to die from the virus.

There are stories like Sutton’s all across the country. Sixty-year-old William Garrison died at the Macomb Correctional Facility in Michigan. He spent 44 years in prison and died of COVID-19 only 24 days before he was to be released from prison.

Michigan Department of Corrections officials have confirmed about 600 inmates, just over 40% of the prison population at Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, have tested positive for COVID-19.

Lakeland houses about 1,400 inmates, half of which are over the age of 55 or have chronic health conditions, said Chris Gautz, a Department of Corrections spokesperson.

He told WWMT-TV that the number of infected prisoners at Lakeland will grow as hundreds more test results return in the coming days.

In Ohio, 3,762 inmates have tested positive and nine have died in state correctional facilities. At the Marion Correction Facility alone, in north central Ohio, of 2,500 inmates, 2,011 have tested positive. The staff of 350 has had 154 test positive for COVID-19.

In North Carolina, 330 inmates out of 700 in a single facility tested positive. In Tennessee, 666 inmates have tested positive.

Pennsylvania has 42 infected inmates out of about 46,600 inmates. The Pennsylvania prison system doesn’t appear to have a problem with COVID-19. What the state does have a problem with is testing. As of April 22, the number of inmates tested by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections was 103—with 31 positives tests or about one in three.

Maybe the tests just haven’t ramped up yet. Well as April 28, the last day that data was available for this column, the number of tests increased by only 34.

DOC staff isn’t getting much better attention. As of April 28, 299 correction employees have been tested.

Besides the obvious need for more testing, what is Pennsylvania doing to protect inmates and staff from COVID-19?

To start with, the DOC has temporarily designated SCI Retreat as the new intake site for all newly committed prisoners and parole violators. The facility, near Wilkes-Barre, has capacity for 350 inmates and will be the only way inmates can enter the system. With a bolstered medical staff and thorough screening the DOC hopes to limit the virus’s entry into the system.

In addition, Gov. Tom Wolf, exercising his authority under the Pennsylvania Constitution and the Emergency Management Services Code, 35 Pa.C.S.A. 7102, ordered the Department of Corrections to establish a Temporary Program to Reprieve Sentences of Incarceration to help aid the DOC in transferring qualified individuals to community corrections facilities or home confinement amid the pandemic.

“We can reduce our nonviolent prison population and leave fewer inmates at risk for contracting COVID-19 while maintaining public safety with this program,” Wolf said in a press release. The Temporary Program to Reprieve Sentences of Incarceration only applies to state prison inmates who have been identified as non-violent and who otherwise would be eligible for release within the next nine months or who are considered at high risk for complications of COVID-19 and are within 12 months of their release.

Vulnerable inmates include inmates aged 65 or older; anyone with an autoimmune disorder; pregnant inmates; anyone with a serious, chronic medical condition, such as, heart disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, bone marrow or organ transplantation, severe obesity, kidney disease, liver disease, cancer or other medical condition that places the inmate at higher risk for complications of COVID-19.

Under the temporary reprieve program, the DOC estimated approximately 1,500 to 1,800 inmates may be released. As of April 23, 118 inmates have benefited by the Temporary Program to Reprieve Sentences of Incarceration.

What else is there?

The courts have the authority through Pa. C.S.A. Section 9777 to release extremely ill inmates. The law permits a judge to grant a temporary deferment of a prison sentence due to terminal or serious illness. Compassionate release, as the deferment program is generally known, has been interpreted by state courts to apply only to terminally ill inmates who have less than one year to live.

The process requires a letter from a treating physician which must include the medical prognosis and a certification that it is the doctor’s opinion that death is near.

Angus Love, executive director of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, “Few doctors are willing to say with certainty when someone will die. That makes it hard for inmates to get the documents to petition a judge for release.”

In 2008, the legislature revoked the ability of a terminally ill inmate to pass his final days at home with family. Since then families had to find and pay for a hospital, nursing facility or hospice care to get their dying loved one out of prison.

Once the legislature took action the concept of compassionate release essentially disappeared. The law’s stringent guidelines are time-consuming and costly. The arduous process causes low risk inmates who were otherwise eligible for release to die alone behind bars.

What can the legislature do?

House Bill 642 introduced by state Reps. Stephen Kinsey and Danilo Burgos seeks to authorize medical parole. The legislation would authorize the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, in consultation with the Department of Corrections, to grant early medical parole under certain circumstances to eligible nonviolent offenders.

In February, before Pennsylvania realized the magnitude of COVID-19, Pennsylvania Corrections Secretary John Wetzel testified at a state budget hearing in support of medical parole. Besides touting the compassionate aspect of release for those who are ill and a low risk, he also touted the economic value of medical parole. Wetzel estimated that medical parole could save the state at least $22 million a year.

Geriatric inmates cost a lot of money. Pennsylvania’s geriatric prisoner population grew to about 6,500 inmates in 2018, according to the DOC.

Pennsylvania has units in several facilities that actually serve as prison nursing homes. There are inmates in Pennsylvania prisons who need dialysis, chemotherapy or other life-sustaining treatment.

Those people don’t belong in prison. Today they’re at a high risk of contracting COVID-19, they are at low, or no, risk of re-offending, and they cost Pennsylvania taxpayers a whole lot of money.

So, what is the argument for keeping the ill and infirm in prison?

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His weekly column on crime and punishment is syndicated by GateHouse Media. He is the author of “The Executioner’s Toll,” 2010. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Pew: Policy Reforms Can Strengthen Community Supervision

A report by The Pew Charitable Trusts details the challenges facing parole and probation supervision systems around the country and outlines specific policy changes that states can make to achieve improved outcomes. Since 1980, the nation’s community supervision population has ballooned by almost 240 percent. As of 2016, 1 in 55 U.S. adults (nearly 4.5 million people) are on probation or parole, more than twice the number incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails. Historically, probation and parole were intended to provide a less punitive, more constructive alternative to incarceration, but a growing body of evidence suggests that a frequent emphasis on surveillance and monitoring of people under supervision rather than on promoting their success, along with the resource demands of ever-larger caseloads, has transformed community supervision into a primary driver of incarceration. This shift has produced an array of troubling consequences, not only for individuals on probation and parole but for taxpayers and communities as well.

To address these problems, some supervision agencies have begun to embrace evidence-based practices that have been shown to improve outcomes and reduce recidivism. These include the use of research-based assessment tools to identify an individual’s level of risk for reoffending, graduated sanctions, such as increased reporting or short-term incarceration, to respond to violations of supervision rules, and incentives to encourage rule compliance. As a result of these and other policy changes, 37 states have experienced simultaneous reductions in crime and community supervision rates.

To read more CLICK HERE

Poll: Nearly 3-in-10 Pennsylvanians have been incarcerated or on probation

Nearly 3-in-10 Pennsylvania voters have a household or immediate family member who has been incarcerated or placed on probation, according to a poll commissioned by the REFORM Alliance, and conducted by Harper Polling in Harrisburg. 

Probation reform is personal for millions of Pennsylvania voters, as 28% say they have an immediate family or household member who has been placed on probation or incarcerated. 

Probation reform is not a regional issue. Geographically, rates of reported probation and incarceration reach their extremes in the rural Northern Tier (37%) and the metropolitan Southeast (34%).

To read more CLICK HERE

Indigent defendants crushed by court costs

Though poor defendants are entitled to be provided legal representation, that does not mean access to the justice system is free, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Court fees — even for indigent defendants — average more than $1,000 per case across Pennsylvania. The median court costs imposed on indigent defendants in the region range from $537 in Philadelphia County to $1,652 in Delaware County, an ACLU of Pennsylvania analysis found. That’s in addition to fines and restitution the court may impose.

For those who spend years on probation or parole, as Hudson did, costs can pile much higher. In addition to assorted fees — $250 for a DNA detection fund, $50 toward the cost of prosecution, $8 for a judicial computer project, $5 for a firearm training fund — he was assessed almost $800 in supervision fees.

In many cases, these costs appear uncollectible: The ACLU found that among defendants poor enough to be assigned public defenders, court costs were paid in full in just 24% of cases over 10 years. Among non-public-defender cases, 54% had paid in full.

“It tends to be the people who are not paying are the ones who have no ability to pay,” Christy said.

In Philadelphia and other counties, public defenders have been campaigning over the last year for judges to waive court costs for indigent defendants, arguing they are obligated to take defendants’ means into account. That question is now before the state Superior Court, which ruled in September that judges did not have to do so — but recently, unprompted, withdrew that opinion, opting to put the question before a judicial panel for further review.

But costs and fines across Philadelphia and its four suburban counties brought in $273 million over the last 10 years, according to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts — making them a critical part of courts’ budgets.

And, in some local counties, judges routinely impose punishments on people who can’t or won’t pay, generally without distinguishing between the two.

In Delaware County, dockets show some people have been sentenced 10 times or more on a single case, with sentence conditions emphasizing paying fines, court fees, or restitution. In some cases, the judge threatened detention in the event of a single missed payment. In others, judges promised early termination once costs were paid.

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