Tag Archive for California

Some Programs Help Mothers in Prison Increase Contact With their Children, But Too Many Prisons Have No Such Programs.

Prison Cell

Prison Cell (Photo credit: danielkoehlersfotos)

When a mother is arrested, there is no specific public policy or routine process to coordinate what happens to her children, even immediately after childbirth. Many women in prison believe that separation from their children is the most difficult part of their punishment.

Although six percent of women are pregnant when they enter prison, most states make no special arrangements for the care of newborns. Pregnant inmates are often required to be shackled while giving birth, and after delivery mothers and babies are sometimes separated within a few hours. The infant is then sent to live with a family member or is placed in the foster care system.

Extended families usually assume childcare responsibilities, though many states don’t recognize family relations as legitimate foster care and deny them financial support and social services. Ten percent of children with mothers in prison are sent to foster homes, while the majority of these children live with grandparents. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 will certainly send even more children into foster care in the future, as it allows courts to terminate parental rights if a child is in foster care for 15 months out of any 22-month period.

Dana Simas, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says:

Women who give birth in prison usually have to hand over their newborn to a relative or for adoption within 48 hours, or whenever the doctor releases her from the hospital.

That narrow window deprives new mothers of the option of breastfeeding their babies, says Karen van de Laat, the southern California regional director for Get on the Bus, a group that organized a special Mother’s Day visit to a women’s prison for 240 kids this year. She says:

Being able to hug your mom should be a right. Some of these kids would rather live here with their mom than go home. Most of the women in this prison are drug offenders or have been incarcerated for check or welfare fraud.

Nearly 900,000 youngsters in California have a parent in the criminal justice system, comprising nearly ten percent of California’s children.

A child’s chances of delinquency increase dramatically when visits to their incarcerated parents are denied. Kids with incarcerated mothers are more likely to wet their beds, do poorly in school and refuse to eat, studies show. These children often experience financial hardship, the shame and social stigma that prison carries, loss of emotional support and fear for their mother’s safety. Children with imprisoned parents are at increased risk for poor academic performance, truancy, dropping out of school, gang involvement, early pregnancy, drug abuse and delinquency. These at-risk kids are most often overlooked by mainstream children’s advocates.

The female prison population has exploded in the past 20 years, mainly due to mandatory-sentencing laws for drug offenses. Three times the number of women have been put behind bars in the last 10 years, over 75 percent of whom have children. Most of these inmates are young, unmarried women of color with few job skills and significant substance abuse problems.

According to a recent article, children of incarcerated parents differ from their peers in three main ways: inadequate quality of care, mainly due to poverty; lack of family support; and enduring childhood trauma.

Sadly, prisons are most often located in remote rural areas and are inaccessible to families without cars. An incarcerated woman is usually much further away from her home and is therefore much harder to visit, making the separation even more agonizing for both parent and child. Sixty percent of parents in California state prisons are held over 100 miles from their children, making visits impossible for many.

Too little attention has been paid to the plight of children with incarcerated parents, so too little is known about how to assist them. There is no procedure or policy to inquire about dependent children when a mother is arrested. If a child is persistently truant in school, there is no protocol to consider the disruption that maternal imprisonment causes at home. If a child is in the care of family services, too little about their emotional history is explored before they are placed in foster care. So there is a gap in policy and in routine communication between the public agencies established to protect all innocent children.

Fortunately, some states have begun to acknowledge the importance of mother-child relationships by introducing pioneering programs. In a few U.S. cities, the Girl Scouts Beyond Bars program brings mothers and daughters together in jail or prison, two Saturdays each month. Mothers spend supervised time working with their daughters on troop projects, and discuss issues such as avoiding drug abuse, coping with family crises and preventing teenage pregnancy.

Family Foundations, is a community-based residential drug treatment program based in Santa Fe Springs, California, where female inmates live in a converted school building with their children up to the age of six. The Mothers With Infants Together program allows eligible pregnant offenders to reside in a community-based program for two months prior to delivery and three months after delivery, thereby empowering women to participate in prenatal and postnatal programs on childbirth, parenting and family support skills programs.

The Mothers and Children Together program in St. Louis provides cost-free bus rides to prison four times a year for families without transportation. They also organize former inmates and volunteers to lobby at the state capital towards the improvement of visiting opportunities, and they hold support groups for recently released mothers, children and caregivers. New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility opened the nation’s first nursery prison 100 years ago and continues to offer a range of services to inmates and their children, including a well-equipped playroom that is open all year. Run by Catholic Charities, it is designed to teach women parenting and life skills through classes and by allowing them to receive visits from their children as often as possible in a nurturing atmosphere. Only ten percent of women who successfully completed the program returned to prison, in contrast to 52 percent of inmates overall.

Inmates who do not receive child visits are six times more likely to be re-offenders. Simas says:

We encourage visiting and we try to make it as positive an experience as possible. We understand that family relationships are a big contribution to someone’s successful rehabilitation. Unfortunately, they are still incarcerated, so there are safety measures we need to follow, but we try to make it as family-friendly as possible.

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The Missouri Miracle

Seal of Missouri.

Seal of Missouri. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Robert Winters, of Kaplan University‘s School of Criminal Justice, has a great piece of work posted on Corrections.com in which he gives voice to the idea that it is more expensive to do nothing about our juvenile justice system. As you might imagine we were terrifically pleased to see one of our main arguments being used.

More effective, less expensive: an admittedly counterintuitive mantra until you actually examine the numbers. Then it suddenly becomes clear that this is exactly the case. Prof. Winters explains how things have turned around since the 1980s, when recidivism was high and rehabilitation rare. (Back to the Future – Corrections.com)

What replaced that broken system came to be known as the “Missouri Miracle.” Traditional facilities were replaced by 32 small housing units (with populations typically ranging from 10 to 30) that are not only located across the state so that juvenile offenders can remain close to home, but also bear little resemblance to a prison. They are more like a group home, staffed by highly-trained personnel who use an approach that emphasizes therapy and rehabilitation over punishment. The staff-offender ratio is very low as well.

Though it might seem that a less stringent security environment—these facilities do not even have fences—would be an invitation to escape, that has not been the case in Missouri. On average there are less than 50 per year. The state does operate eight isolation rooms for juvenile offenders and still has a traditional prison for offenders under age 17, but the isolation rooms have been only rarely used and the prison has contained less than five inmates for most years of the new program.

What qualified the “Missouri Miracle” as a miracle? Recidivism into the juvenile program is now under 8%. The rate of adult conviction of former juvenile offenders now hovers between 7% and 8% for a five-year period after concluding the program. New York’s juvenile system, by contrast, has an 89% male recidivism rate. In Illinois it was 50% in 2006-09, up from 33% in 1996-99. Roughly half of Missouri offenders return to school successfully, and another third earn high school diplomas or a GED while in the program. Compared to Missouri’s 91% education rate, the national average is 46%.

It might be reasonable to assume that such commendable results come at a high price, but in fact the opposite is true. New York’s cost is $210,000 per juvenile for a nearly 90% failure rate. The national average is around $100,000. The Missouri Miracle, on the other hands, costs about $50,000 per child annually.

This is no big secret. All you have to do is look at the numbers. In this age of rhetoric, seeing actual facts used to to state the case is a joy to behold. Even better is the fact that Winters points to several other similar programs that have been kicking off around the country.

The District of Columbia started to use the Missouri Model in 2009 with mixed results. The first facility based on it cut its recidivism rate in half. Unfortunately there was also a tragic incident where a middle-school principal was killed by several juveniles who were serving under the new program.

Here in my home state of Louisiana, which has always deserved a horrible reputation when it comes to corrections, we saw the Bridge City facility open in 2007. Again based on the Missouri Model, it serves male youth offenders aged 10 to 20 serving sentences ranging from six to 24 months. Since opening it has achieved a recidivism rates of 10 %.

Other jurisdictions are finally starting to experiment with the Missouri Model, including New Mexico and San Jose, California. We have faith that the model’s success can be replicated in widely divergent areas of the country, and each time it shows gains in another community the evidence becomes more impossible to ignore. This is the sane way to both fix the system and reduce the budget needed to do so at the same time.

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Special Federal Homeless Effort Coming to California

English: A homeless man in New York with the A...

A homeless man in New York with the American flag in the background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to the California Housing Finance Agency the number of homeless in California is almost equal to the number of people that live in the Central Valley city if Visalia.

To anyone who is paying attention, the number of people living on the streets has gotten out of hand. Their already sizable numbers have been swelled by victims of the housing implosion and the economic downturn. More faces every day join the ranks of those sleeping under bridges, in tents and worse.

Now some federal assistance is on the way. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has chosen six states across the union to participate in their new “Policy Academy” program to help combat homelessness.

The Central Valley Business Times brings us some details about the program:

As part of the Policy Academy, California will receive technical assistance to reduce chronic homelessness. About one of every 280 Californians is homeless, according to an annual report to Congress.

“We must push forward with aggressive, forward-looking, coordinated programs to fight homelessness in the state and the country,” says Ms. Cappio. “We cannot look the other way. It affects so many of our most vulnerable residents.”

The Policy Academy will include a comparison with other programs and practices that have worked across the nation. The effort is intended to reduce fragmentation, increase community education and leadership, and provide a framework to best use available resources.

The approach seems laudable. The Policy Academy will focus on identifying how programs across the state and federal levels can be coordinated into a multidisciplinary assault on homelessness.

Various programs already exist, but they operate independently creating a scatter-shot approach to the issue. The Policy Academy will, if things go according to plan, allow efforts like the Affordable Care Act, CalFresh, CalWORKs and Medi-Cal funds to make more of an impact by working in a synergistic fashion.

The range of agencies runs from non-profits to law enforcement, including:

  • Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission
  • Department of State Hospitals
  • Department of Alcohol & Drug Programs
  • Department of Health Care Services
  • Health & Human Services Agency

We have often pointed out the complexity of these issues, and the need for coordinated, cross-disciplinary action. Let us hope that this is a step forward in that regard.

 

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AB-109 and rising crime – Is there a correlation?

Sacramento Police Department

Sacramento Police Department (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A little over a year ago Gov. Jerry Brown’s AB-109 began the process of reducing the state’s prison population by 33,000 before June of 2014.

Under the bill, triple-non — non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual — offenders would become the responsibility of the counties, not the state, with a large number of them returning to the streets of California.

In that time crime has been rising, and many fingers are pointed at AB-109 as the cause. Unfortunately there was no language in the legislation dictating how to asses the results. While the counties that have accepted assistance of a technical nature from the state are required to report, there are no standards of procedures for that reporting: a truly stunning oversight.

Heather Gilligan of The Sacramento Bee is one of the few journalists sharing police data on the subject. This excerpt provides the numbers she came up with.

“It’s diminishing public safety,” said Lynne Brown, director of Advocates for Public Safety, a group that represents law enforcement officers who want to repeal AB109.

Republican legislators agree, and they have called for a special session of the Legislature to change or kill the law. They say that crime has increased in Sacramento, Stockton, Oakland and Los Angeles, according to preliminary numbers from police departments.

There have been many incidents in the news involving crime perpetrated by released inmates. One particularly violent example is that of parolee Raoul Leyva. Raoul allegedly beat 20-year-old Brandy Marie Arreola into a coma last April. The beating occurred not long after he had been sentenced to jail for 100 days for parole violations but had been released after two days due to overcrowding. In light of the numerous incidents it behooves us to take a look at the situation in greater detail.

Ms. Gilligan continues:

But police data actually show a mixed picture.

In Sacramento, Part I crimes, those that are reported to the FBI and eventually become the uniform crime rate for a city, are up by 8.1 percent this year compared with the same period in 2011. Homicides, however, decreased by 18.5 percent, according to Sacramento Police Department crime data.

Violent crime is currently down in Los Angeles by 7 percent and property crime is the same year-to-date. In Oakland, Part I crimes have increased by 20 percent, according to the Oakland Police Department. Some increases – like those for rape (up 21 percent) and robbery (up 20 percent) – are striking. Part II crimes – including minor assault, drug possession, vandalism and fraud – have decreased by 10 percent.

In Stockton, there have been 51 reported homicides this year – six more than in the same period last year, according to Stockton police spokesman Joseph Silva.

“Clearly, what’s happened with (AB109) is that criminals learn there are no consequences,” said Assemblyman Bill  Berryhill, a Republican whose San Joaquin County district includes Stockton and Modesto.

But determining the effect of a single policy on crime rates is difficult, said Joan Petersilia, professor of law at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.

No matter how you slice it, the issue is a complex one. The lack of any procedure for collecting data on how this influx of former inmates will impact the communities involved is troubling, to say the least. The fuzziness on details also means that most communities are forging their own paths when it comes to their methodology in handling the realignment.

Los Angeles and San Francisco are great examples of this in action. In LA, the jail population is increasing, while in San Francisco they are reducing theirs by keeping the focus where it should be: on rehabilitation.

We need more hard data, and we should have had a plan in place before releasing these inmates. Without proper support – therapy, drug rehab, job training, etc. – the chances are that many will offend again.

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Education and Prisons in California

There are two vital issues in California that are inextricably linked – education and incarceration.

Education is one of the most reliable paths out of poverty and deprivation. Those who live within the confines of our overburdened prison system are quite often those deprived of it.

This is what makes it so terribly disturbing when you look at the numbers released in a recent study by California Common Sense. Stephanie Chung of NBC covered the story last week when the report was released:

California is spending 1,370 percent more money on prisons today compared to 1980 levels. NBC Bay Area got the first look at a report from Los Altos-based, non-partisan research group California Common Sense (CACS) published Thursday.

It’s the first time a group has looked at 30 years worth of data and crunched the numbers to show a long-term trend between state spending on prisons and on higher education, according to Director of Research Mike Polyakov.

California spent $592 million on corrections in 1980, Polyakov said. That spending has jumped to $9.2 billion in 2011.

Meanwhile, higher education spending has decreased. Researchers found that there is a trend to pay University of California and California State University faculty less money than in the past.

The disparity is unnerving. Even more so when you start reading through the report. Let’s take a look at the key findings, shall we?

  • Corrections’ growing slice of the State budget, High Education’s shrinking slice. As CDCR’s share of the State General Fund budget increased steadily through most of the last three decades, higher education’s share declined consistently.
  • Corrections’ first recession era budget cuts in 30 years. Although the Corrections budget survived most previous economic downturns unscathed, since the onset of the most recent economic downturn, expenditure on Corrections has seen a substantial decline.
  • Corrections inmate population explosion driving higher costs. Over the last 30 years, the number of people California incarcerates grew more than eight times faster than the general population.  Our calculations show that 55% of the increase in the cost of the state prison system between 1980 and 2012 (after adjusting for inflation) can be traced to this rapid growth.
  • Annual salary increases for prison guards, stagnant faculty salaries over last decade. Whereas prison guard salaries are subject to periods of sustained salary increases, faculty salaries have seen only weak growth over the years, falling in real terms over the past decade.
What does it say about us as a society that we spend so much on imprisoning our population, yet so little on preparing them for a productive and happy future? More than half of the increase in corrections’ spending is attributable to the massive increase in the imprisoned population, an increase that occurred during the period when “zero-tolerance” laws were very much in fashion.
Which one do you think will provide society with better long-term returns: pouring money into education so that our children have the best possible chance for a future or continuing to pay skyrocketing prices to file away our society’s cast-offs behind concrete walls and bars?
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A Conversation with Jeanne McAlister

Today our resident blogger had the opportunity to talk with Jeanne McAlister, Chief Executive Officer and founder of McAlister Institute. The conversation was enlightening to say the least!

Jeanne McAlister, the Chief Executive Officer and founder of McAlister Institute, has been a pioneer in the field of recovery. She has constantly advocated for responsive and needed treatment services and developed programs which could easily be replicated by others. Recognizing that drug abuse negatively affects all aspects of the individual, family, and community life, the goal of McAlister Institute programs is to assist individuals in regaining their lives by supporting the recovery process. As a result, tens of thousands of youth and adults have successfully regained their lives through her vision and with the help of McAlister Institute’s wide variety of programs.

Budget Cuts Endanger The California Dept. of Juvenile Justice

Money 2Under the reduced budget enacted earlier this month, the California department of Juvenile Justice will cease to exist unless counties shell out $125,000 a year per youth offender. That’s bad.

Marisa Lagos of the San Fransico Chronicle notes the conundrum facing California counties in the new year:

Under the automatic cutbacks approved by lawmakers in June and set to take effect Jan. 1, the agency’s $72 million annual budget will be eliminated, and counties will have to pay the state $125,000 a year for each juvenile offender it wants the state to continue housing – or take those youths back to serve their time at local facilities. In a series of letters to Gov. Jerry Brown, the statewide associations representing county governments, district attorneys and probation officials have warned that the change will force counties to make the “untenable” choice between paying millions of dollars a year they don’t have or moving youth offenders to county facilities that are ill-equipped to handle them.

This will have the deleterious effect of pushing large numbers of youths into adult facilities where it only costs about $50,000 per  annually to house inmates, as opposed to the $175,000 apiece for juveniles. The problem is that the extra $125,000 per inmate for juvenile offenders pays for vital treatment and programs. The difference is stark, just look up the recidivism number on kids incarcerated as adults (there’s a lot of documentation in our prior posts, go look around).  Saving that money short term will breed more hardened criminals in the long term. Which is really more expensive?

To add another layer of complexity to the issue. The serious, violent youth offenders are a lawsuit liability for the counties. Criminologist Barry Kriserg, a long time monitor of the department of juvenile Justice, has warned that they could face litigation if the add violent youth offenders into existing county facilities. Of course county officials are worried about more than just potential legal action, as Lagos notes further down in her column:

‘If counties are forced to absorb this population in some fashion at the local level, we are concerned that the mixing of the most serious and violent juvenile offenders with the youth now in our custody and care will greatly compromise rehabilitative efforts with the current local population,’ wrote Mike McGowan, Gregory Totten and Linda Penner – the presidents of the statewide associations representing counties, district attorneys and probation chiefs – in a Dec. 7 letter.

This population, they wrote, ‘is decidedly unfit’ for county facilities, ‘as these youth possess complex criminal profiles often accompanied by significant mental health, behavioral and treatment needs.’

It is those needs that account for the $125,000 per inmate that the budget cuts are trying to save. Failing to address them in the short term can be far cheaper, but is it really worth the expense? That money pays for programs to fight recidivism, programs geared towards the immature psychology and neurology of youth. Without those the potential for kids to enter the system and come out as hardened criminals rather than productive members of society skyrockets. That means more money spent on enforcement, more money spent on court, more money spent on future incarceration, and the unmeasurable cost to the victims of their future crimes.

Which is really more expensive?

Image Source: borman818 on Flickr, used under it’s Creative Commons license

States Get Graded on Treatment of Pregnant Inmates

Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing TimeA  report card that examines the treatment of mothers and pregnant women in prison has been issued recently, and several states are none too happy about the grades they’ve received. (California scored a cumulative “C-” in case you are curious.)

Here is a link to the PDF version of the report, which was issued by the National Women’s Law Center and the Rebecca Project for Human Rights: “Mothers Behind Bars: A State-by-State Report Card and Analysis of Federal Policies on Conditions of Confinement for Pregnant and Parenting Women and the Effect on Their Children.”

For those of you short on time, here is an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

There are now more women behind bars than at any other point in U.S. history. Women have borne a disproportionate burden of the war on drugs, resulting in a monumental increase of women who are facing incarceration for the first time, overwhelmingly for non-violent offenses. This rampant incarceration has devastating impact on families. Most of these women, unseen and largely forgotten, are mothers. Unfortunately, pregnant women, incarcerated women and their children are subject to federal and state correctional policies that fail to recognize their distinct needs or honor their families.

The Rebecca Project and the National Women’s Law Center collaborated on this Report Card, which analyzes federal and state policies on prenatal care, shackling, and alternative sentencing programs and grades states on whether their policies help or harm incarcerated women in these key areas. This effort is intended to help advocates assess their own state’s policies affecting these significant phases of pregnancy, labor and delivery, and parenting.

The state of California received a “C” in prenatal care, a “B” on shackling policies, and an “A” on the family-based treatment as an alternative to incarceration. The last one is a heartening statistic to see, since that sort of program has the highest chance of reducing recidivism, and also radically reduces the costs at the state level. Other states fared far worse. George Prentiss, a reporter for the Boise Weekly, reports that his state received a “D” in prenatal care, a “D” on shackling policies, and an “F” on the family-based treatment.

Gene Park of the Star Advertiser reports from Hawaii, a state that received a flat-out “F” on the subject of prenatal care:

Most states fared poorly on the report. Only one state, Pennsylvania, received an overall grade of A. Including Hawaii, 27 states received an F grade for prenatal care.

Well over half of the states in the U.S. got an “F” on prenatal care. Think about that for a moment. No matter what view you might have of these women, the bottom line is that the unborn children of inmates are not responsible for where they are. Even if they were, this sort of treatment drastically affects these children, as they grow into adults. Twenty-seven states. We should be ashamed.

Park writes:

The report states more than 115,000 were in prison as of 2009, and that figure is rising at a higher rate than that of men since the introduction of mandatory sentencing policies for drug offenses.

Kat Brady, a coordinator for the Community Alliance on Prisons, told the Star Advertiser that over 80% of the women incarcerated in Hawaii have been convicted on non-violent offenses. Quite often, these same women have a history of substance abuse or physical abuse, she added.

Source: “Report: Idaho Fails to Provide Proper Treatment for Pregnant Inmates,” The Boise Weekly, 10/21/10
Source: “Pregnant isle inmates allegedly treated shabbily,” The Star Advertiser, 10/22/10
Image copyright Susan Madden Lankford, from the book “Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes.” Used with permission.
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Debtors’ Prisons: Feeding a Vicious Cycle of Recidivism

Money macroPicture an inmate at the end of his sentence. The barred gates of the jail open up, and he steps out into the fresh air of freedom. Let’s assume this is an inmate who has been wholeheartedly reformed, kicked his bad habits, and has a determined attitude about rebuilding his life.

Then the bill comes. Not the rent or the bill for utilities, but a bill for the legal fees incurred, plus fines. Suddenly, that inmate ends up back in prison through no fault of his own except for lack of resources.

This is the picture presented by Charlene Muhammad of the New America Media as she examines the new findings presented by the ACLU:

After a year long investigation into the assessment and collection of fees associated with criminal sentences in Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, and Washington, the ACLU reported in ‘In for a Penny: The Rise of America’s New Debtors’ Prisons,’ that courts across the U.S. were profiting from debtors’ prisons by violating a Supreme Court decision ordering courts to investigate a person’s inability to pay before returning them to prison.

Since the poor and the minorities are disproportionately represented in the average jail population, this raises a number of disturbing issues. Since Muhammad’s article is quite long (and is highly recommended, by the way), we’re going to focus on one of the people she has interviewed, Geri Silva.

Silva is the director of Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes Law, and she raises many valid points. For on thing, in a country where right to counsel is axiomatic, the idea of making everyone pay the fees and fines irrespective of their financial means is ridiculous. That right to counsel exists to protect those who have no means:

[Silva] said the irony is that states are jailing people in ‘cash-strapped’ cities for failing to pay their legal fines, but turn around and pay triple or quadruple that amount to put people in jail.

‘It sort of leads one to believe that perhaps jails and prisons are money making enterprises for the states. All roads lead to prison and all thinking leads to the fact that if they’re filling these prisons, it’s not about public safety obviously but it has to have something to do with financial gain for the industry itself,’ Ms. Silva said.

[Silva] reiterated ‘In For a Penny’s’ position that men and women who are re-entering into society from prison already face tough obstacles. They have to try to rebuild their lives with reduced or no incomes, worsening credit ratings, poor housing prospects, and greater chances of recidivism.

Think back to the hypothetical inmate: Will he make it out of the jail with that same attitude after this, or will it kill the idea that he can be a productive member of society? After all, he’d played by the rules, and through no fault of his own ended up in prison again. How would you feel?

Muhammad writes,

‘How far will they go? Who are they trying to kid with this? How do you get blood out of a turnip? How does somebody who can’t pay, pay? Will they then find the one person who had their nails done or something instead of paying? Is that what they’re going to do to justify this insanity,’ Ms. Silva asked.

According to Ms. Silva, all of these issues that hang over a poor person who has been incarcerated stems from America’s building an industry that is skewed, sinister, uncivilized, and centered on punishment. Ask taxpayers if they would rather pay $600 in legal fees or thousands in jail costs and they would pick the more sensible route of less costs, she said.

Which brings us back to one of our recurring themes: It’s More Expensive to Do Nothing. Once more, the imbalance between taxpayer expenditure for jail costs is staggering compared to the cost of defraying these fees. As taxpayers, we would love to know that our taxes are not only being deployed to an effective program, but also that they are being reduced due to that program’s efficacy. It is, as they say, a no-brainer.

Consider the massive amount of cash it takes to run a jail or prison. Think about the cost of everything, from guards to food to laundry, but also about the number of staff needed to ensure a smooth operation of the facility.

Let’s close with one more remark from Silva:

‘The industry itself is tremendous. Can you imagine what it takes to run, say, California State Prisons in terms of food services, clothing, armaments, initially the building trades? It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that a great number of people are getting fat off of so it’s so disingenuous for them to say they’re losing money because people aren’t paying their fees,’ Ms. Silva added.

Should we be paying for this, or should we demand fiscal responsibility and a new approach?

Source: “Report: Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons Devastating the Poor,” New America Media, 10/20/10
Image by Kevin Dooley, used under its Creative Commons license
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The Stand Down in San Diego: Three Days on “60 Minutes”

Homeless Man with Two Flags in NYCSan Diego’s yearly Stand Down event just passed recently, hosted by one of the oldest and most well-known programs to help homeless veterans. In case you’re not familiar with it, The Veterans Village of San Diego website describes the program as follows:

In times of war, exhausted combat units requiring time to rest and recover were removed from the battlefields to a place of relative security and safety. Today, Stand Down refers to a community-based intervention program designed to help the nation’s estimated 200,000 homeless veterans ‘combat’ life on the streets.

VVSD organized the nation’s first Stand Down in 1988. Since then, the program has been widely replicated nationwide. Today, more than 200 Stand Downs take place across the country every year. ‘The program has become recognized as the most valuable outreach tool to help homeless veterans in the nation today,’ according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

This video report from The New York Times YouTube Channel provides an inside view of the 2009 Stand Down. Among other things, it looks at the growing and disturbing new demographic, homeless veteran women:

A stand down provides a number of basic services that are lacking in life on the streets: showers, haircuts, medical and dental attention, benefits assistance, counseling, 12-step meetings, and more. Some of these things, like the simple old-fashioned shower, we take for granted, yet having them makes all the difference in the world for those who lack them. How can you find a job and pull yourself up if you cannot even get clean enough for an interview?

While we cannot embed it in this post, the full 60 Minutes report is available online. You can watch it here.

When looking at social programs like this, we need to remember that many of these people simply need a hand up, not a handout. The investment in our community returns manyfold in both tangible and intangible ways. This is why we always talk about our stance on this subject being a bipartisan win-win scenario. From the conservative perspective, rehabilitating the homeless back into society makes sound financial sense — as it will reduce the overall cost to the system over the long term.

From the liberal perspective, the socially conscious angle is the one that is of most importance. The vital thing is to note that despite the differences in how they reach that conclusion, both sides of the political equation should find it easy to see that it is, indeed, more expensive to do nothing!

Source: “WATCH: Can Three Days Make A Difference For Homeless Veterans?,” The Huffington Post, 10/17/10
Source: “Homeless Vets: Does Anyone Care?,” CBS News, 10/17/10
Image by NYCUrbanscape, used under its Creative Commons license.

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