--Mike Connelly

“Marissa Mayer Doubles Yahoo’s Paid Maternity Leave, Gives Dads Eight Weeks Off”

If somehow you’ve had a major void in your life that you couldn’t understand, it has to be you haven’t been reading this blog during its constant harping on the destructive decision by Yahoo’s CEO to end at-home work for her employees, thus increasing carbon emissions (more than just the added cars on the road) and setting the standard for other major companies. Best Buy followed within the week. Our point has always been that we better figure the “at-home” thing out for all major orgs that can do it, including Corrections Sentencing ones, because the costs of buildings (owning and renting), transportation, lost morale from increased staff costs on top of the added emissions from Yahoo et al. are not bearable now and will be worse as The Perfect Storm wreaks its toll. Did you catch in our Perfect Storm update yesterday the latest CO2 level we’re going to hit soon? (You didn’t? Man, that void is major.)

It’s legit to see this as a blatant PR move designed to deflect the criticism she’s received for building a day care facility on site for her own new baby (so lovingly held in the so loving picture released with the so loving story) while telling parents to get their butts to the office for free food, fun, and spontaneous innovation just like Yahoo’s competition, which still actually have much better and longer leave policies, it turns out. Which shows she still thinks the secret of success is seat time, being where she can see you any time she wants. She justifies her moves based on what her competition does but only seems to copy the parts that satisfy her control needs.

But here’s the real question if you want to figure out how much of her management belief system is anything other than the usual bunch of clichés strung together in the best MBA/consultant-speak: where’s the study of the ratio of “creativity and innovation” that the at-home work ban was to provide versus the “creativity and innovation” of just letting people not do any company work at all for weeks and months at a time? Wouldn’t someone as “data-driven” as her acolytes claim she is want to see those numbers? Do babies at birth weight more heavily in the data than babies a year or more later? Or is all that just a bunch of PR specialist bushwa better at image management than actual management?

As stated above, this isn’t irrelevant to Corr Sent, no matter how tired you are of us harping on this. You have the head of one of the leading companies in America deciding to add to climate change through more carbon emissions in a variety of ways just because she’s bought into tripe that at-home workers are goofing off and need seat time/cubicle time/free lunch time to generate wonderfulness. You will hear very similar and worse arguments when the time comes to consider cutting your own Corr Sent emissions/energy bills/rental units through allowing more at-home work from your staff and others. We need to be working out whatever real problems exist, not fantasizing about faux ones, because one of the very best and easiest ways to adjust to most of the components of The Perfect Storm is going to be at-home work, whether that fits with old guard management or not. The ones who figure it out, including Corr Sent execs, will be the ones who win, using concepts like “personalized leadership” researched here that does require much more and different leadership and management skills for distributed personnel than the Yahoo CEO clearly has demonstrated. The info tech companies that figure it out will win big time. Needless to say, it doesn’t look like that latter group will include Yahoo.

--Mike Connelly

Not a boffo week for management articles, but there are some generally useful ones below and some that might be more specific to particular readers. The last one on “value-cost” leveraging may at least give you something to talk about over that pitcher or keg this evening. You know how your friends love it when you bring up academic articles from your line of work. Or substitute the “super password” one for Pictionary!! (Or if your eye gets captured by someone special at the bar this evening, bring up the question of the first article. The response will be memorable. Beyond words. We promise.)

“Evaluation or Research? Is the Distinction Important?” (hint: yes.)
“Slow Down, You Think Too Fast”
“How Good Are You at Ditching Distractions?”
“How to Lead Effectively: 6 Strategies”
“Managing the Mess: Go Directly to C” (good idea of Corrections Sentencing reform)
“Why Employee Development Is Important but Neglected”
“Meet the New Boss, Meaner Than the Old Boss?” (please do not shoot this messenger)
“Three Rules for Finding a Career That Makes You Happy”
“Be Prepared to Answer These Questions During an Interview”
“How to Get Your Way”
“How to Say ‘No’ to Your Boss” (we’re not responsible for anything that results from this)
“A Simple Way to Create a Super Strong Password”
“Finding the Sweet Spot of Value and Cost”

Have a good weekend. Remember your Guinness. It’s Good For You!

--Mike Connelly
Got some high quality stuff for you this week. Your job is to figure out which ones we’re talking about. We do dare you to send the last one around to others in your office. Particularly your supervisor/boss.

“Talent Executive Says Annual Performance Reviews Are Huge Morale Killers” (file under “duh”)
“A Question of Accountability: What Happens When Employees Are Left in the Dark?”
“Stop Thinking That Hard Work Will Get You a Raise” (performance not well linked to success, but you didn’t need to be told that, right? Look at Microsoft. And the Kardashians.)
“The Exact Words to Use When Negotiating Salary”
“The Best Bosses Don’t Have to Work on the Weekends”
“Top 6 Reasons Why People Hate Their Bosses” (Because bosses read the article just above???)
“Snore More, You’re Probably Sleep Deprived”
“Interrupt Me for Five Seconds?—Fuhgeddaboudit!”
“The Fairness Flaw: Why ‘Fair’ Managers Often Falter”
“The Best Mentors Are the Ones Who Scare You a Little”
“It’s Off to Work We Go” (relationship between home location and work)
“18 Ways Your Office Job Is Destroying Your Body” (and you thought it was age . . . or is that just me?)
“How Modern Technology Is Destroying Your Posture at Work” (I’m now down to 4’8” . . . )
“Wanted: A Life Outside the Workplace”
“New Data Shows Depth of Employee Discontent”
“Ask These Questions During the Job Interview to Identify the Right Hires”
“Narcissism and Leadership”
“Working with a Narcissist”
“How to Get the Job Done When You Just Want to Crawl Back into Bed”
“Why Employees Quit Their Jobs”
“Do You Have the Leadership ‘X Factor’?”
“Catfight? Workplace Conflicts Between Women Get Bad Rap”
“Why Focus Makes Us Smarter—and 8 Ways to Sharpen Yours”
“Meditation Is the New Yoga: Bringing Mindfulness into the Workplace” (like we said, we dare you . . . .)

--Mike Connelly

Judy Greene of Justice Strategies and I spoke to Oklahoma legislators and representatives of groups related to corrections and sentencing in the OK Senate Chambers on Tuesday, February 19, 2013.  The organizing topic was how to maximize use of state resources in a period of budget problems in order to also maximize public safety and reduction of victimization.  Judy spoke on the 1990s effort in OK to reform sentencing there and the role private prisons played in limiting and negating those reforms.  As the research geek who had run the numbers then, I spoke on the activities and products of the advisory sentencing commission and its successor, the permanent commission, which managed to make it until late last decade, in that period.  Judy also spoke on private prison impact on prison populations nationally in the last two decades and on what other states have done structurally more positively to change the rate of their prison growth and to close prisons.  I spoke to the needs of effective contract negotiation and monitoring if private prisons had to be part of the state's overall mix of criminal processing system policies and demonstrated that overinvestment in prisons compared to other spending options in and outside of criminal processing did not make OK "tough on crime."  Rather, I informed the audience of approximately three dozen that crime does very well in OK, particularly violent crime, and that, were I crime, I might consider retiring in OK, or at least purchasing a vacation home.  Questions and answers provided a wide range of political and fiscal concerns.

--Mike Connelly

Sit back with your diet soda and revel in these latest assists to your management and career future. Putting your feet up on your desk might be a little much, but, if your supervisor isn’t around, who are we to say? (And if s/he IS around, have the first article there at the bottom of your screen for easy and fast clicking.)

“Companies That Offer Flexible Schedules Get More Out of Their Employees”
“The Beauty of Brevity” (meeting, presentations, memos—need we say more?)
“The Least Effective Bosses Don’t Bother to Train People”
“Why the Hiring System Is Failing”
“Why Leaders Don’t Understand How to Play the Innovation Game—and How You Can Help Them Win” (bunch of tips on what innovation is and isn’t, including warnings about the “big data” craze relevant to Corr Sent and this truth: “The greater the magnitude and volatility of the forces that drive the future, the less likely you are to get it right.” Just ignore all the spelling problems.)
“How Winning Works: Building Great Work Teams” (did anyone know Harlequin published leadership books? Wanna guess what the content includes?)
“When Your Job Hurts”
“Nine Practices to Help You Say No”
“Myths of Power—With No 3: The Maligning of Hierarchy” (“power over” v. “power with”)
“Five Signs Your Star Employee Is About to Leave”
“Finding Self-Discipline in Others” (impact of work peers on performance . . . or other peers on other things that could get you into a DOC)

--Mike Connelly

Some good articles up right now if you’re into good correctional management, either as a practitioner or one who pays for the practice with tax dollars. In no particular order:

“The Importance of Training for Corrections Officers”

Not that J’me or I need to be convinced, but this experienced (aka “old”) CO knows that good training is more than a hoop to meet accreditation standards. As a start to what will apparently be a regular column at CorrectionsOne, he presents the wisdom of several years in the field, including how to present and motivate. Some of the topics to be addressed besides motivation? How about learning, improvement, responsibility, and continuous process? Here’s the one on “improvement” to show you he knows what he’s talking about:

Improvement: On-the-job work improvement is due to individual learning, the norms and values of the working group and the general climate of the agency. Trainees learn as individuals, they apply it to their jobs because they want to improve their careers and supervisors should support that. Also, individual learning should not be unused -- if a staff member attends training, he or she should be given the opportunity to practice what he or she has learned. If not, the employee may become frustrated.

We’ll follow his progress on the site, but you could do a little bookmarking yourself, you know. In any case, we’ll look forward to where he goes with this.

“Not in It for the Money?”

This Corrections.Com piece, by the guy who did those items on managing change in prisons we linked to last week, lauds the average correctional officer who does a tough job that won’t come close to making you rich. If you’re doing it legally, anyway. Not a cheery piece, frankly, not one you’ll make copies of and pass out at recruitment fairs. But worth reading and having on hand when you hear some economist propose that COs be held personally responsible for the recidivism of any inmates who crossed their paths.

“Innovation and Creativity in Corrections”

Irresponsibly missed this item at Corrections Today’s online site last summer, but better late and all that. Especially nice to have it after the article just above, since it notes how important the contributions of ALL correctional staffpeople are to the chances at success of offenders (“success” as we define it, not them) when released. And the importance of recognizing the need for change, with the data to back up the successes and areas for improvement, especially as we go through this difficult period. That’s where those things in the headline are called for, and they can come from any of us. We don’t have to wait on outsiders or voices on high. There are things we can do now, many of which we’ve outlined here, that can make an impact and help us through The Storm even if others aren’t ready. This is a good piece to have on hand to push that message along.

“Futility in Criminal Justice and Prison Reform”

It’s a good thing to read the item above before tearing into this offering at Corrections.Com. Man, if you think we go Debbie Downer . . . This writer can challenge our frequent contributor Lamar Shapiro, at least in passion if not in style. He goes after racial disparity, privatization, longer sentence lengths, solitary confinement all in one page, and the inability and unlikelihood of present government policy to effectively change things. Then proposes non-incarcerative sanctions to lower prison populations, things like “hard labor, judicial corporal punishment and the wearing of metallic collars, with or without electronic enhancements.”

Can we hear a “whoa,” brothers and sisters? But the nice thing about these kinds of thought-provokers is that they set the poles for possible options farther out than even we have been doing here, making our projections for Corrections Sentencing by 2020 seem less threatening and remaking than other possibilities. So we say to the writer, keep hammering home. If Corrections.Com gets too wary of you, give us a look. Mr. Shapiro can give you our references.

 

As you watch the Weather Channel between games this weekend to determine when the latest “once in a century” storm in the last ten years hits those East Coast games, here’s a bit more Perfect Storm news this year that came in after our earlier post this week. Good thing that eastern storm will be gone for another hundred years.

“Squeezing Blood from the Desert: The West Grapples with Less Water”

This is a very good overview piece about the reality and future of water use in the West, where there are a few prisons located. Colorado River, Ogallala Aquifer, other major historical resources going bye-bye. New regulations on agriculture, urban use, something really wild called “reality-based water pricing” developing. (Shouldn’t we start referring to “reality-based” Corrections Sentencing rather than “evidence-based”???) Fed subsidies dropping, major conservation being implemented by some cities. Other cities (like Midland, TX . . . hmm, Midland, Midland . . . didn’t somebody with real power in US politics once come from there??) get bond rating drops because of ineffectiveness (aka blowing off) water management, a future more than Midland faces. But what’s new in this, at least to us, is the realization that as cities do successfully cut back, they cut off the major source of revenue for water boards to pay off past infrastructure investments and to fund new ones. Think those boards and the cities they serve will be shy about turning to state and fed government for help? Think people going without affordable water won’t make a large voting bloc? Think Corr Sent budgets will be safe from the resulting triaging of priorities and programs? (Believe it or not, we left much of the article unsummarized so click that headline.)

“US Shale Gas Bubble Is Set to Burst”

Okay, follow along. The rise in natural gas prices as old reserves depleted provided the funding for a mass of new investment which brought on the fracking and new techniques to get the expensive gas supplies that low prices didn’t make attractive. But as the new supplies came on from this wild investment in massive amounts (but more quickly depleting), that high attractive price dropped like a rock. And now the chickens in the fracking and related “new tech” are coming home to roost, as this article details, like the amount of energy and water it takes to bring home this “cheap” gas. So, despite the CNBC and gas industry hype (got some spare change to invest in those sure thing wells??), we’re looking at less than we’re being told. The article may be wrong, but it’s not asking you for your money, either. In any case, don’t start lowering your appropriation requests for future energy costs quite yet.

“Climate-Changing Methane ‘Rapidly Destabilizing’ Off East Coast, Study Finds”

Speaking of the East Coast, it apparently has tones (actually gigatonnes) of frozen methane gas off shore. Only, the warming ocean has started melting it down and emitting it. If you’ve forgotten, methane (best known as what cows also emit) is a greenhouse gas, more potent but shorter lived than the carbon dioxide we all know and love in climate change. Don’t mess your Depends yet. Probably not enough emitted from the ocean fast enough to change projections, yet, but the fear is that the East Coast is just one of many areas where this is happening. Need more beer yet?

“Ocean Power the Ignored Alternative”

But let us not come to bury the ocean (Shakespeare, anyone?). Let us come to praise it. Those areas of the world with both the power of the currents/waves and the exchange of cooler with warmer flows within it can generate a lot of power, maybe more than solar or wind. Makes engineers get goosebumps apparently. We don’t talk much about ocean power generation here much (in large part because we’re essentially clueless about it), but for those of you in coastal areas, read up. This is a real possibility for offsetting at least some of the changes, like energy and transportation costs in your budget, that energy supply and price shifts are bringing (and will).

“Dominance of U.S. Corn in Asia Shaken by Drought, Price”

Well, we thought we’d gotten good news that the US drought’s impact on global food supplies and prices wouldn’t be as bad as originally thought. And it’s not. For the rest of the globe. But it’s meant that sales usually made by US to other countries are now being made by other countries. If we don’t want permanent losses to state economies, we need to start spreading gossip now so those relationships get doomed quick. Just like we did in junior high.

You remember how.

--Mike Connelly

Wanted to note for you that we’ve added this report from the Sentencing Project to our links of important Corrections Sentencing Reform 2.0 articles in the upper right of this page. We had only gotten started a bit at JCO and were working on proposals more than the blog when it came out. That said, we shouldn’t have held off as long as we did pointing it out in case you hadn’t seen it.

Basically, the Project people got brief essays from some crim justice types around the country to talk about their vision of criminal justice by 2036, a little broader scope than our outer boundary of 2020 here.  Some of them were specific to their concerns, others more expansive and systemic, but all the works are interesting and will invoke head-nodding among our readership here. Jeremy Travis prints out his keynote address to the Project conference with many very good ideas and points, including more focus on ALL crime victims (not just those involved in cases making courts), our sad lack of data and understanding of why crime rose and fell so dramatically 20-25 years ago, development of standards for our assertions of evidence for evidence-based practice, shifts from cases to problemrecs as our units of concern for policymaking, and changes in how we think about prisons.  Bringing all these items to serious agenda-setting, he says, will require “superheroes” of science and passion.  Yes, you may be tempted, wide-eyed, to close the page at that point, but hang in.  More realistic stuff is coming.

We won’t go through all of the remaining 24 essays, just point out that Alan Jenkins has a good essay on the need for a “compelling narrative” to drive the thought and action in future criminal justice policy as well as the institutional structure to continuously drive that message home.  Dennis Schrantz has a clever vision of 2036 as a period in which mass incarceration has ended, similar to our posts here on how our approach to policy in Corr Sent would have played out in other historical controversies.  The public health model gets used more than once as a viable alternative to our current paradigms, and juvenile justice doesn’t get shirked if that’s one of your interests, either.  Proper concern is shown for issues of gender, race, and class, and several writers do note that we don’t really have a criminal justice system, but don’t go as far as we do here to just call it a criminal processing system.  Obviously nicer than we are.  Todd Clear reiterates points we linked to here earlier about how to cut prison populations more dramatically than Reform 1.0 ever could.  In fact, he makes the simple case about 1.0 that, since the best recidivism reduction we can hope for, from the research, is 20%, a 50% recidivism rate will only be cut to 40%, not nearly enough to meet the demands and needs by 2036.

Being us, we can’t let the report go without noting things we would have liked to have seen or would have said.  While the need for an “echo chamber” was rightly cited a couple of times, no recommendations made about how to get that going beyond the occasional reports and tv appearances we now get (with their limited effects) and one essay noted how very difficult it is to even get press coverage of real prison issues.  The Project did get an “angel” DA to present on what his district has done to affect prison usage and get more treatment, but there was a reason he was picked.  His district is an exception, not the rule, to the general orientation of prosecutors nationally, dominated as they are in volume and probably number by their self-appointed “archangel”colleagues.  Get the essay-writer on are form panel without having to kowtow to his colleagues, something would get done.  That doesn’t happen and isn’t going to.

As frequent readers know, we at JCO are concerned about the, frankly, failures of other disciplines like econ and poli sci, psych and policy analysis to make overall constructive contributions to their own fields and policymaking and how those failures can bleed into disciplines like ours that follow their approaches and rhetoric.  A good essay here castigates folks who want to still be using leeches, so to speak, in what we do, but there’s no recognition that medical research has MAJOR problems itself and no call for attention to understanding how those disciplines have screwed up so we don’t repeat their errors.  And Travis’ essay, as good as it was, seems to feel that because the causes of cancer don’t vary across the country, the causes of crime and their resolution in a nation with Louisiana and Texas, Vermont and Massachusetts, Washington and Oregon, and Wisconsin and Minnesota shouldn’t be seen as varying either. Good luck with that.

But you can probably guess what our biggest criticism of the report would be, given our constant harping on The Perfect Storm.  Despite these essays being done in 2011, a year when the clarity of weather, water, energy, and associated concerns started hitting home in a big way, they could have been written 5, 10, some even 20 years earlier.  With the exception of the public health essays, they are all still “inside the silo” that has blinded us to forces outside that silo that will have far more impact on what happens in Corrections Sentencing by 2020 than anything the writers discuss, much less by2036.  Elliot Currie does show some needed skepticism about the fiscal capacity of government to make the changes proposed therein, but he’s still mainly “inside the silo.”  Until these and other thinkers get that there’s a wave hitting waayyy far inland and not going away, even these valuable contributions will be far too inadequate to get us where we will need to be.

Enough.  It’s good to have any serious thought about our predicament beyond the next couple of years or a five or ten year prison population projection inside the silo going on and disseminated.  If/when your state understands the true enormity of what’s facing us and starts frantically wracking around looking for ideas and priorities, this will be one of the first places you should start.  Don’t worry.  It’ll just be a click away in the upper right.

 

--Mike Connelly

We know, we know. We promised once the Oklahoma legislative session was over, we wouldn’t keep hammering on the reform [sic] that it passed this last year for the overassuming and underperforming undergirding the entire legislation. But this op-ed tipped us over again, although we will claim that this post is just another in our continuing complaints about “good” articles that overlook and understate so much about policy in our criminal processing system. It’s our home state and we know so much more of the “inside” story on this that we can’t just let this stuff slide.

The piece lauds the legislation and hypothesizes that OK will be the next great example of criminal processing reform nationally. All based on a piddling sum appropriated to cover new required supervision of inmates who used to be released directly to the streets, grants to local law enforcement that will likely be used to offset losses in staff due to budget cuts rather than initiatives spelled out in the bill (although the names of these initiatives will be used exponentially more in press releases, just watch), and even more piddling money for pre-sentencing mental health assessments of offenders. The op-ed also notes that DOC can build intermediate revocation centers, but the money was not available, meaning that halfway houses from the private sector will be the go-to for that part of the legislation, the private sector that gains nothing from actually reducing prison populations.

We’re not making any of that up. In fact, it’s worse than it sounds. For instance, the money appropriated for the increased supervision? More than offset by mandated increases in private prison funding. As this article spells out, the senator responsible for that says DOC has the money to do both, but it turns out that’s only by cutting deeply into the inventory budget for the state correctional industries program, one of the best anti-recidivism programs DOC runs. So it looks like those parole officers will have even more to do as recidivism goes up.

The law enforcement grants will be allocated by the state Attorney General’s Office, not exactly unbiased and critical of tough-talking, sameo-sameo walking. And those assessments before sentencing? No one bothered to do intense focus-grouping of the state DAs or judges to even see if they’ll be looked at, much less followed. Historically, OK practitioners have not been supportive of outsiders telling them how to sentence, as witnessed by the very sparse use of even pre-sentence investigations in the state. The fact that few counties could provide data on PSIs to the reform team might have been a tipoff if anyone had actually been interested in likely implementation when the legislation was going through.  The capper is that the evaluation [sic] of this reform will be done by the Attorney General's office (who will for one thing be evaluating himself on how well the grants he made decisions on did) which has, we're certain, no professional program evaluator on staff and is only empowered to gather stats from contributing agencies to issue in a descriptive stat report each year.  No independent and professional analysis of actual effectiveness of anything passed.  Good plan.

All of this will be familiar (and maybe nauseating) for regular readers here. What’s most concerning about the op-ed isn’t so much it’s unquestioning acceptance of the value of the legislation (even after the invaluable OK Policy Blog has repeatedly raised questions). It’s that we get the frankly dangerous invocation once again of Texas as the shining example that Oklahoma will try to follow. Bluntly put, in a process supposedly based on evidence-based practice, we have little evidence that Texas has accomplished what is claimed for it or, even if it has, the states following it have followed or will follow what got TX there.

For one thing, note that Texas’ push for reforms came from a flat-out rejection by the House Speaker there of any more new prisons. With that strict ceiling placed on what the state would do, the House and Senate leaders there had to come up with other ways of protecting public safety. That did lead them to the research behind evidence-based practice and many of the changes that had worked in other places. Ask yourself, though. How many other states have such a restriction placed on their ability to do prisons prior to their reforms? The answer in my experience with these efforts was none, but I don’t know if that holds absolutely. It didn’t in OK and won’t in the coming years that are supposed to receive continued support after the top political leader supporting them leaves through term limits.

But before we go crazy about just the bills that got passed, what happened to appropriations and a continued commitment to the move away from prisons? This piece and this one make clear that the state continued to add prison space (2000 beds) despite famously closing an old prison located in a now-upcoming area that doesn’t think prisons nearby help property and resale values. And the writers castigate the policymakers for, when push comes to shove again, valuing prison beds over spending for the treatment associated with the reforms. This piece noted that 1000 treatment beds had gone unused, probably in large part because the legislation didn’t require their use by judges and prosecutors (see OK above).

But that’s not even the real concern. The Texas reforms got passed in 2007, probably took a year more or less to implement (although not completely as just noted). It’s only been in the last year or so that a professional evaluation could legitimately be done of any long-term and lasting impact from them. You seen one? One that includes all the other factors that may have influenced the favorable stats that get hauled out without question to demonstrate reform effectiveness? Seriously. If you’ve seen one, let us know.

Such an evaluation would have to take into account any trends in TX crime rates before the reforms ever went into effect. If you look at the state’s crime rates, you’ll find that its crime rate has dropped every year since 2002, FIVE YEARS before the reforms even passed. Before 2002, they had dropped every year from 1988 to 2000, then edged up a bit in 2001 and 2002 before their current descent. IOW, the claim to fame of the Texas reforms, prominently announced in the OK op-ed, that the TX crime rate dropped after the reforms and therefore all states should follow its lead was actually a continuation of a two-decade trend started by factors as yet unproclaimed but very likely still in play. Another IOW, before we point to changes caused by the reforms, we need to introduce other factors into whatever model is used and then ruthlessly parse out the effect of each. While the programs recommended may be evidence-based, the reforms themselves are not and proclamations of their value and impact should be withheld until they are.

Which gets us back to the cheerleading of the op-ed. To its credit, the newspaper in question has been one of the few voices for reform in Oklahoma going back a couple of decades now and deserves far more kudos from the state’s citizens that it will ever get. But that doesn’t excuse reporting that has but doesn’t use the Internet to track down basic info like that available at the OK Policy Blog or in simple crime rate stats. Pieces helpful at the time may blow up badly for everyone in the reform cause if/when fallacies behind the assumptions and assertions for the reforms actually do come to the fore.

Just note these stories at the same time as the op-ed that seem to hold promise for possible fuse-lighting. This one on a proposed halfway house location drawing strong opposition in the community. This one and this one from the state DOC trying to assure residents that halfway houses aren’t major threats, but it’s a promise always made with breath held (note the “usually” in the story). And this one showing homicide numbers in Oklahoma City up for the first half of 2012. You wanna be the one claiming wonderful things for reforms if/when something like these or other possibilities explode? You better be on the firmest ground possible with your data and examples.

Which means much, much better and more substantive than citing piddling changes that may not even cause change and relying on a state that really hasn’t demonstrated reform effectiveness conclusively yet as proof of anything.

--Mike Connelly

Set of stories out in the last couple of days demonstrating that our pace and scope of Corrections Sentencing Reform are inadequate to meet the piling up of markers being left already by The Perfect Storm. When you’re on a calm part of the river, you can afford to take it routinely and not worry about a mess-up here, there. When you hit the white water, that same approach gets you capsized. The Storm is the white water and we need other ways. As the stories below show.

“Can Another Study End State Inmate Overcrowding?”

Finally some skepticism in West Virginia regarding the possible Corrections Sentencing 1.0 that is in process there. This piece notes the DECADES of study of the state overcrowding problem and, despite the assurances of the current reform team leader, questions the likelihood of this new effort being any more successful. The article remembers that the legislature had a deal in the last session that had passed one house overwhelmingly (hallowed bipartisanship at work!!) but was shot down by the House Minority Leader whose objections caused the uber-bipartisan governor to shift to this new effort. Whose objections haven’t changed, according to the article, and who is already whacking at the “bipartisan” team put together for this one. No way if it’s the same old stuff, he says. And everyone else insists there has to be consensus. So guess who has just been given a veto over anything meaningful happening?? Meanwhile practitioners lament the repeated failures and wonder what if anything substantial could be accomplished. Anyone wanna send them a link to this blog and the Corrections Sentencing Reform 2.0 pieces we have over on the left side?

“Gov. Tom Corbett Signs Pennsylvania Prison Reform into Law”

Remember a while back when we noted that North Carolina had passed as part of its vaunted Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0 package the usual “make inmates released to the streets receive mandatory supervision” menu item? But the legislature didn’t pass any new appropriations to pay for it, just like the OK reform effort did pass some money but then required new expenditures for private prison funding that more than wiped that money out? IOW, two states literally getting that “half a loaf” that the reformers don’t want to be the enemy of the good. Well, add a third, Pennsylvania. The governor did get a bill passed on his quick time schedule, but held off on the new menu item, returning money to local jurisdictions for crime prevention that is a major part of the “reinvestment” promised. Which the reform effort chief advisor explicitly said had to be part of the approvals if the reform was to work as projected. Don’t worry. They’ll get around to it later. Like next fall maybe.

Meanwhile, the irreplaceable OK Policy Blog looks at the effort there and notes, once again, that it left a whole lot undone and poorly monitored. It goes further, of course, and adds a list of items that need quick attention by state policymakers that didn’t make the proposals, probably because they aren’t part of the usual menu we’re talking about (our speculation, not the blog’s). Such as ending driver’s license suspensions for getting caught with controlled substance in the car (whether you were under the influence or not), punitive workplace drug testing laws, and harsh sentences well above the national average for non-violent offenses. The half a loaf folks will correctly say that nothing stops the state from doing this in future years. Only politics, like the departure of the term-limited Speaker who led the meager efforts that did get passed the last couple of years, the only bites of the apple the state will take for several years. (At least after voters there decide whether to pull the governor out of parole decisions for nonviolent offenders, which is touch and go at best.)

Meanwhilec, the state’s second major facility only has 48% of its authorized correctional officer complement and is about to receive a bunch of long-term inmates to keep disruption down. Except that relatives of the transferred inmates aren’t confident of the success and are fearful of possible violence against their family members. NONE of this was addressed by the recent reform efforts, and the upfront costs on DOC there for the efforts were explicitly ignored in the passage of them. And the “halfway houses” that supposedly will relieve pressures are already drawing opposition in the communities where they may locate. As this piece argues after reviewing the complaints, “Any guesses on how that will go?”  Maybe if we had had people like the analysts for OK Policy Blog at the table instead of the same people who put stakes through the last efforts at reform in the state, there'd be no need for guessing, or at least getting the right agenda set.

Actually, they’re not guesses, are they? For any of these states. And the practitioners in all of them, just a few years from now, will be quoted just like the WV ones in the first article, as those states start playing the game once more. Slo-mo in white water. We can do better.  We have Corrections Sentencing Reform 2.0 with the new play list for rowing and balancing at the ready.  But we have to start by seeing the kind of river we’re in. Before, you know, that capsize thing.

--Mike Connelly

If you’ve been a longer-term reader here, you know we have been stressing the importance of facilities improving their activities toward greening and sustainability in the face of the onslaught from The Perfect Storm. This piece describes how one state is already taking a leading role in that and below this another state has structured a program that might serve as a model.

Illinois, screwed up in so many other ways, nevertheless has a formal program now, "The Sustainability Initiative,” complete with website and necessary “bottom-up” approach emphasizing individual facility capabilities. Here’s a bit to get you to hit the links for the story and for the website (we’ve added the link down the right side in case you forget it):

A cornerstone of the Sustainability Initiative is improving the economic and environmental efficiency of IDOC operations. That means conserving energy and water, recycling and composting waste, and growing more food. The multifaceted program will save taxpayer dollars and help create job training opportunities to provide offenders with the skills they need to take advantage of Illinois’ fast-growing “green collar” sector upon their release.

While the Sustainability Initiative identifies department-wide goals, it also calls for a “bottom up” approach to encouraging sustainability throughout the agency. Each facility has a sustainability committee that will be tasked with driving innovation and creative practices at the local level while keeping in the mind the unique attributes of their facilities.

Several IDOC facilities have been involved in sustainability projects for some time. The Menard Correctional Center, for example, has been recognized at both the state and national level for leadership in sustainable practices and programs, such as biodiesel production and the manufacture of certified green cleaning products. Other examples include the Horticulture program at Logan Correctional Center and the recycling programs at Centralia and Shawnee correctional centers. The department will build on these successful efforts, which will serve as templates for similar initiatives throughout the agency.

This story sort of follows along with a nice breakdown for a California program that could be adapted toward the water and energy conservation skills and urban gardening abilities that we endorse for reentering released inmates who need to be contributing positively to the usually needy areas where we stop their buses.  Your state got a model that we could promote?

--Mike Connelly

Looks like we were correct when we posited yesterday that Joan Petersilia’s keynote address to this year’s (the last??) NIJ conference would focus on how the reforms of the 1990s disappeared when money came back to state budgets. This account describes the bulk of her remarks, which apparently used her home state of California as the test case for her concerns. As we’ve noted here, CA has done its “realignment” of offenders from state to county custody too fast for effective vetting, with little understanding or preparation to determine impact, with the possibility that crime will get worse, not better, and with sparse funding for the treatment programs necessary to keep the county jails from replacing the state as the defendants in the next federal lawsuit. She also made a pitch for “social impact bonds,” which encourage private entrepreneurs to do projects aimed at social outcomes like recidivism reduction to make their profits while saving public money. It could happen, but it could also end up like private prisons. (The evaluation of success just in itself is a really thorny concern, even for something relatively concrete like “did they end up back in prison?”)

I was a little disappointed in one part of her presentation, however (although I’m getting it second-hand, as you will if you click the link, that is, when you click it). She makes the exceptionally valid point that “We’ve got to stop overselling community corrections—and under-delivering.” If that sounds similar to the concern we express about overselling the research behind evidence-based practice, you get extra points and a cookie (you have to contact J’me for the cookie). She notes her concern (fear?) that, when these programs fail, the natural inclination is to return to prisons if/when possible. And right now she’s right.

But in that, she’s falling back on the “prisons = public safety” argument herself when she doesn’t include a forceful critique of prisons as failures as well, which is not mentioned in the article. This is a harmful missing link in our approach to Corrections Sentencing reform and why we argue that we need both prison closures and adoption of the elements found here as the public safety-effective ways of getting around the dilemma she rightly exposes. The problem is, if you only focus on Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0, which is what she apparently did in her talk, then you have no other possibilities. It’s only when you acknowledge the other options that will take the stake holders (those who hold stakes to thrust into meaningful reform that threatens their personal interests and agency sunk costs) out of the mix and make removal of the prison default possible. Thinking “outside the silo,” IOW, as we advocate here, rather than “outside the box” that’s swirling down the drain already and still has the vast bulk of The Perfect Storm to deal with.

Still, given that she’s identified a major part of our future problem that reformers and policymakers haven’t even got a clue about right now, we shouldn’t criticize too much. She’s performed a valuable service with this address. We can only hope that people listen, that it sets a foundation for moving beyond the boundaries of possibilities that even she is apparently stuck in.

--Mike Connelly

Couple of useful Corrections Sentencing reports getting blog attention right now. This one, the latest Pew Center on the States report [disclaimer: I did some early review work of part of the recidivism study discussed], looks at how much longer most but not all states keep offenders behind bars now than in 1990, the direct cost increase of that, then takes that added step of figuring out how much public safety was bought with that increased length of stay. In the three states specifically researched, turns out not that much more, if any, public safety, but the additional 9 months LOS was a big chunk of money. (Uh . . . $10 b., more or less. With a “b.”)

As we’ve said before here, we believe most of the Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0 tech assistance work that Pew and its partners manage to accomplish (which varies greatly from state to state) will fade quickly with The Perfect Storm and with changes in policymakers, as it already has in the early states (varying again). But the work they’ve done with their research reporting should provide a solid foundation for data and analysis in individual states as well as for researchers and policymaker staffs for at least 3-5 years beyond publication date. That may not sound like much, but it’s huge for practitioners wanting to know what’s happened in their states and elsewhere recently. 3-5 can be “recently” enough.

Still have quibbles. They don’t endorse but still promulgate those suspect “prison accounted for 25%-33% of the crime drop of the 90s” models that didn’t include many if any of the variety of other factors associated now with that period, like increased private security forces, changes in attitudes about consumer confidence or institutional legitimacy, effects of ingested lead from the air, the rise of video games taking rowdies off streets, the improved use of pharmaceuticals with mentally ill would-be offenders, the hotly contested “abortion,” the ridding of streets of violent offenders by other violent offenders, the “Lysistrata” effect* of young women backing away from guys likely to die on the street or in prison, etc. IOW, were you to change the time periods or prominence of any or all of those factors or have your incarceration increases start with those variables adjusted, it’s very likely that you’d end up with different percentages of impact. Those models, more importantly, NEVER ran the numbers using the increased use of probation and community sanctions which ran virtually parallel to the incarceration increase graph lines, so seemingly having basically the same effect as prison. But the “prison 25%” meme has entered conventional wisdom where reality is impervious, and no one ever once considers that the dollars spent to get that 25% might have gotten 35%, 60% or whatever if spent in the areas we now know have enormous and higher impact on most crime and offenders.  No stopping a weak concept that fits on a bumper sticker.

Sounds like more than a quibble? Not really, since the report does basically gloss over the meme, probably more to avoid being hammered were it omitted. I was puzzled why, after the care to discuss the public safety results in the exec summary and the total report, the one-page graphic available for quick reference made no reference at all to the public safety side. If the graphic is available, it will be what gets used, and the innovative work on the public safety methodology and results will twist in the wind. And I would have very much liked to have seen at least a nod to something other than the traditional “violent, drug, property” breakdowns, something like the risk/need assessment tools that we went to in OK in my years there because the traditional categories really didn’t separate offenders well for treatment or policy purposes. You want to concentrate your diversion on the low and moderate risk, who may or may not be “violent” or “first-time” or whatever has blown up debates in the past. Those data aren’t generally available, though, so the report can’t be ripped for not analyzing by the better categories. But a major report using conventional but very imprecise categories for the discussion will foster more use of those categories unless a note is made that those categories are the best we can do, not the best there are. Finally, the usual list of Corr Sent Reform 1.0 options is offered with states that have done them, most of those states still facing enormous need for change even after. IOW, Corrections Sentencing Reform 2.0.

Still, as said above, a good and useful report, taking wind out of the arguments of “stake holders” (those who plunge the stakes they hold into serious Corr Sent reform), even if those folks will still use those arguments on their death beds. Bookmark it and have it ready at hand. With the cuts happening everywhere else, this will likely be the best you have for several years.

The other report getting play here is actually a month old, give or take, but it too has value if you’re interested in using drug and other specialty courts in your state, or already do. You’re directed to the NIJ summary page, with links to the voluminous work, but the summary page frankly is too summed and the reports are of such length as to scare off all but the poor staffers assigned to write the no more than two page memo.

Which is a shame, because the report, its methodology and implementation, and its results are innovative and get around some basic problems of other reports on those courts. The conclusion—DRUG COURTS WORK—unfortunately isn’t actually demonstrated, as we’ll discuss below, but this work is the most thorough addition to frequent literature aggregating results but leaving analysis of individual courts alone.

The report takes drug courts operating in 2004 and carries forward with participants and “comparison” offenders from the same or different states. This is unfortunate but common, treating all states as homogenous in their cultures, peoples, contexts, and histories, as we note here from time to time. The report does manage to avoid the usual problem of only looking at program completers, but its percentage of those who complete appears way higher than the barely more than 50% number of all who start drug courts who complete that you hear nationally. Or at least that OK has used to say its 1% better total completion rate is better than the national average.

The report does detail each court in some depth in terms of process and it does spell out what you need to have the most effective court available. I may have missed it in the mass of materials, but I didn’t see how each individual court did. It would be hard given the limited number of participants studied from the courts to come up with use-able stats for each court. But that’s a major part of what we in the field want to know. We KNOW that there are some extraordinary drug courts, on both the good and bad ends. Aggregating results and then pronouncing ALL drug courts WORK is touchy. We want to know which ones work BEST and we want their numbers, not the washed out ones including the bad courts.

Here’s what I was looking for in this report and didn’t get. I’ve noted here before that OK’s drug courts have only been evaluated one time by an independent evaluator. If they have been individually evaluated by the state agency also responsible for advocating for them with the public and policymakers, those results were never made known to other state agencies. That they weren’t when they could have been spoke a great deal actually. In the one independent evaluation, they got hammered for not truly diverting offenders from prison as mandated but for taking offenders bound for community sanctions and in effect switching them to more expensive drug court. But drug court works, you say, with all levels of risk, as this report says, so that’s okay. No, not really, when you get the “barely 50% of participants complete” part to compare with the completion rates of probationer drug offenders who start probation then either complete or don’t. We looked at that in OK and it was in the same “barely 50%” range, too. At much less cost.

Needless to say, this would be difficult to do with a multi-state study, but here’s what could and should have been done to be more convincing and helpful to those of us in the field. How many offenders studied would have gone to prison were it not for drug court availability and how many would have ended up in community? DOCs and probation agencies would have those numbers. OK ran both in the same department so we had them for all groups. The relevant comparison groups were not the offenders matched as best as possible across different states during the same period but the offenders from the same jurisdictions who were sentenced before drug courts came available. Or similar offenders sentenced from jurisdictions within the same state without drug courts.  At the very least, these should have been included with the other analyses. In The Perfect Storm, policymakers are going to need to know as closely as possible how many offenders, percentage-wise, they can expect to see not going to prison because of the drug courts. Like I said, maybe that was done in the portions of the report after my eyes glazed over, so I apologize if you find it when you read through.

Okay, didn’t get what we would need, but what we did get was probably as thoroughly and carefully done as could be. The researchers have some good stuff on how they avoided being labeled associated with the government and what they learned from a human subjects perspective that should be required reading for all projects like this. Plus, their interviews with the participants give us a better idea of actual offending going on after releases than the usual data we get. Those things alone make the report useful.

And again, we’re not quarreling with the conclusion that some drug courts do amazingly good work. But this report only demonstrates that drug courts in the states aggregated together did good work on average. Over half a dozen years and many more drug courts of varying quality since ago. I can bet a large part of my fortune that the OK agency responsible for selling drug courts there has already used it as proof that its drug courts that flunked their one reliable evaluation are good and should get more of the funds being triaged when in fact dollars appear to be just as effectively spent on traditional P&P supervision at much less cost. I hope future researchers realize that their results can do that kind of harm. And I hope they care.

*"Lysistrata" effect refers to a presentation I heard a dozen years ago by a practitioner from New York City who said he had seen the impact of young women turning their backs on their male counterparts who were active in the drug and gun scenes.  He admitted he couldn't prove it or come up with data (how exactly would you do that and how reliable would anything be anyway?), but he was convinced it played a part.  And, if you think about it, it wouldn't have to even exist anywhere except in the minds of the young men lusting as young men do.  In any case, the same difficulties the guy talked about would prevent it from being tracked in any modeling, but, if it exists and can't be included in the models, then it's the models with the problems.  As we concur.

--Mike Connelly

Saved the comments on PA’s venture into Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0 for a separate post, seeing as how we dealt with the last three major states, OK, MO, and GA, separately. The reporting so far on this hasn’t been as thorough as in the other states, which, given the spin in those states, doesn’t necessarily mean the reader knows less after reading. Read for yourself here and here and see if you agree.

From what we can tell, the proposal is standard 1.0 with one sorta exception, more incentive for counties to keep offenders sentenced less than one year who now cost almost $50m. a year apparently. That’s known in the trade as a “prison population driver.” The rest of it sounds like mixes of more grants for cops, changes in DOC policies and procedures, and only parolees in halfway houses.

As we always say, none of this is bad, just not anywhere near sufficient for what that state is facing with its overcrowded prisons. $50m., give or take, a year in “savings” from hoped-for changes out of a $27.14b. (with a “b”) budget. Apparently the PA DOC is getting no additional money, but it also doesn’t seem to have been given substantial new upfront responsibilities with that like OK stuck on its DOC. If you’ve been reading our critiques, you’ll know we’ll ask “where’s the oversight body to monitor and ensure real savings?” (none mentioned). We’ll hold off on our usual concern regarding telling the state it’s saving money it didn’t spend in the past or will have in the future (like telling a strapped family whose last car was a used Chevy that they’ll save tons on their next Lexus) until we see if that deal with the “less than a year” guys holds.

Which it might not. Read the first link again and note the exchange between the governor and the DA about how the prosecutors will need more info before signing on. We see two patterns of DA behavior in these groups—if they are pressed for cash themselves and don’t want to hack the pollicymakers off, they stay quiet, as they did in OK and MO, but wrangle behind the scenes; if they aren’t pressed, they raise hell and just try to kill anything they don’t like, as they did in IN. DAs can mobilize the public around “soft on crime,” but not so easily around “my office needs more money.” The more money needed, the less the overt opposition, at least at first. The part of the exchange that expanded to Tony Fabelo, the chief consultant, sounds like the DA may have gone off script a little too soon. Fabelo says flat out that the DA’s concern was discussed by the group without this objection at the time (strategy #1), a rare public whack at a group member by the consulting team. The DA ultimately falls back on “we know best,” aka “Some of us have been doing this for years.”

Exactly. You archangel DAs HAVE been doing this for years, the same years that the problem has festered and blown out. Which is why we here strongly advocate actions and decisions that avoid the “stake holders” like this DA who are so invested in the “years” of status quo that they are now rendered incapable of thinking in any constructive way about significant change.

Actually, I would have loved to have seen Fabelo’s face when he posed his comment to the DA. He has dealt with the archangels for decades and knows both what’s coming from them and how not to just sit there and take it. One legit concern about Reform 1.0 procedurally is that, if you’re going to insist that the only reform possible is marginal adjustments to existing practice that will require “buy-in” from the people who got us into our predicament, then at the very least you need someone like Fabelo as the consultant at the table with his own years of knowledge and experience of dealing with those holding tightly and absolutely to their “stakes” to keep their status quo from being harmed. Fabelo is a great choice for this, but there’s only one of him. As far as I know.

The interesting thing about this particular effort to me is the way the governor has apparently tried to control events and discussions concerning this. Early on, he was taken to task editorially for the secrecy of the workgroup, and now he proposes getting everything passed in . . . the next three weeks. You might expect us to frown on this, but frankly, giving the “stake holders” time to organize and use familiar scare tactics wouldn’t be really shrewd. As the DOC head said, “we’ve been talking about this for 10 years. There’s nothing new here. Nothing here has surprised anybody.”

Which says better than we can why Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0 like this is a cheap hardware store parka in The Perfect Storm. When states have accumulating costs (like a $2.2t. (with a “t”) infrastructure bill looming that actually underestimates) and states already have to backtrack on what they thought they’d have available in coming years (as NJ is doing right now), the economy alone will keep this from getting the job done. Add The Perfect Storm, and it’s like hearing the first five seconds of a (insert your favorite singer/band here) song. Pleasant enough, but not enough. PA clearly already knows this. It may get a low-hanging fruit picked, which will be better than nothing, which is basically what MO ended up with. At least no one is expecting the changes to cost MORE, like informed folks in OK are predicting. So, okay. As the editorial stated, “the state’s problems require results,” not just “great intentions.”

It just didn’t say what level of results.

--Mike Connelly

If there is any merit to Pulitzer Prizes, the New Orleans Times-Picayune should already have its name on this year’s plaque for its ongoing series examining the “money wasted on prisons” (on steroids) over the last week. We already noted the lead article, which would qualify the paper for the award just by itself. Tuesday, we noted the next article in our News section which highlighted the power politics, not public safety, concerns that motivate the prisoning there, like it does in virtually every state, even if not as fully and to the same degree. Louisiana is a mirror of the rest of the country. A funhouse mirror, maybe, but what happens there happens in other states, making this series really a reflection of the basic problems of Corrections Sentencing across America.

Tuesday and today, the paper features stories on life without parole (LA’s % of inmates on LWOP dwarfs most other states) and the current governor’s skimpy record on pardons, especially in light of predecessors. We’ve noted repeatedly that it is as clear as research can be right now that every dollar spent on a prison bed is, overall, less cost-effective for public safety than a wide variety of other uses for that dollar. The only dollars well spent on prison beds are those spent on offenders who have committed heinous acts and are likely to do so again and/or who have committed so many offenses of such great expense to the community that their continued criminal activity does indeed balance or exceed the cost to house them. Both of those are also subject to research, but they exist and do show the need for and importance of prisons in our mix of policies.

States that don’t systematically abuse LWOP have probably identified a large bulk of such folks when they sentence them to it. But, unless we assume that Louisiana residents are abnormally brighter than the people of the rest of the states, a charge that I’m unaware has ever been leveled at the state, the numbers in the article show that the state has crossed the line into abuse. And that means that inmates, such as those reported in the article, are serving longer than they should at costs that shouldn’t be paid, meaning that dollars that could have been better spent to actually stop crime and victimization did not get spent in those ways. Meaning LA has allowed more crime and more victims than it had to.

Similar logic [sic] applies to the pardon issue, wherein the lower level of pardons is justified by the public demand for harsher justice, “justice” that leads to more crime and more victims. Without one word about any actual analysis that this payoff is being achieved, not one stat offered of how those pardoned before have been outrageously destructive, not one study being cited at all (maybe because they can’t be??). But they have to listen to more active “victims” now, it’s claimed. You know, the loud, in-your-face victims. Victims who are representative only of a subset of all crime victims, as we’ve noted and demonstrated here regularly. Victims whose intense needs for retribution in fact lead to outcomes that create more victims. More victims to call for more “justice” that leads to injustice to people who didn’t deserve it. Good plan.

So both those stories are worth your time just to follow the series along. This one today, though, ranks with the initial story in its importance as it details (chillbumpingly, to those of us who’ve been through this cra . . . process before . . . in more than one state) how ever-present “stakeholders” are able to kill even meager efforts to get situations like these under control. In this case, how DAs and sheriffs managed to undermine even the state governor (ala Indiana recently) and his latest LA Sentencing Commission. (I do love how one guy quoted there can’t remember how many the state has had by now. It’s not the only state with “trying the same thing” written all over it.) Now, like Oklahoma and Missouri in recent days, the state is hailing weak gruel as Guinness beef stew (which, btw, is delicious). “A heel of a loaf is better than no loaf at all” and all that.

The story does something that would allow a direct study of the effectiveness of what LA does if public safety really were the goal (which, we’ve noted, the other stories have shown it’s not). It lists five crimes and their punishment ranges in LA, TX, CA, and IL (is it fair to only use basket cases?) to show how much more severe generally LA’s sentencing laws are. But it would also allow this if someone would fund it (hint, you big spenders on corrections and sentencing reform): take a group of releasees from each state for each crime and only that crime every five years going back 20 years. Advance them forward to see how many are back in those systems and their time outside before they did come back. Yes, problems with those convicted in other states and so on. Show us that wouldn’t even out per state. Then just look at whether the longer sentences and longer times served produced better outcomes in terms of later reconvictions and reincarcerations. (NOT arrests, for reasons we’ve spewed out before.)

But the LWOP and Death guys don’t get out, you say? They do in at least one of the states per offense so recidivism can still be judged as acceptable or not. We know from our research in Oklahoma that high risk/need offenders had lower recidivism rates with straight prison sentences than with probation or a combo of prison and probation so we would expect the rates to be high. But if they are in the same or an acceptable range, then the lower of the sentences and times served would be more justifiable as what we call here a “public safety sentence” that the state should legitimately be on the hook for. Any time over that, as we’ve noted, should be paid by the jurisdiction that wants to give public safety-endangering sentences.

Back to the story and why it’s important. Check this quote from the head of the state DA org: "You had basically reformer-types who were driving the recommendations, and whatever they would recommend, there really wasn't enough stakeholder input and buy-in for the Legislature to pass those things," Adams said. In the newly formed commission, sheriffs, district attorneys, judges, victims advocates, public defenders and key legislators all had a voice.

Ah, yes. “Stakeholders.” Conveniently listed. By definition, the “stakes” they are “holding” are the status quo, how the system operates now. So, by definition, since stakes are at stake and the only reference point is the current system, nothing can come from these bodies that is more than one or two degrees of separation from the situation that got you mucked up enough to call for the formation of the group. AT BEST. For decades, Corrections Sentencing policy has used a model best designed to address and tweak existing processes to resolve comparatively minor problems, NOT develop alternatives that needed to disrupt or even overturn the system in which all the “holders” have “stakes.”

But those folks have to “buy in” if you’re going to be successful, you say. If the first model is at play, yes. But mistaking the need for application of the systemic change model with an incremental “the process is okay, just needs an adjustment” model leaves you exactly where LA and a load of other states are today. Weak gruel/Guinness stew and all that. But what else could we do than tweak the current system? Well, go over on our left side to the Special Topics Series and read the first publication. Then come back to the right side and read the Important Corr Sent Reform 2.0 articles. There are plenty of options.

No legislature would ever form a group to propose those or accept any recommendations from it if they did, you say. Well, the Pennsylvania legislature didn’t create this group of liberal to conservative advocacy, professional, and county groups. That ad hoc group showed not only that you don’t need “stakeholders” able to veto what they don’t like but also that groups can develop recommendations independently from the current national reform organizations. (They do appear to be working in conjunction with one of those orgs, but they wouldn’t have to.) True, they parroted what Texas did even as TX is finding it hard to live up to those 1.0 reforms, but, if given the options of the alternatives described above, perhaps a similar group could be even bolder in what they presented to lawmakers.

No legislature would listen, you say. They’d be voted out of office in a heartbeat, you say. The anti-reform message is too strong. But what if an ad hoc group put together a strong message emphasizing state voters paying for “crime college,” emphasizing the over-reach of central government, emphasizing the high cost of policies less effective than those that cost less, emphasizing the people who get rich on prisons out of middle class pockets? There are constituencies for every message I just listed. What there’s not is leadership because, on the local and district level where legislators get elected, small motivated zealots can sell the scare message without serious pushback. But if a state has statewide leaders willing to build the coalitions that respond aggressively to the concerns above, then ignoring that message on the local level can be just as dangerous. Hit the “stakeholders” with “Show Us the Safety.” Make them PROVE that these sentences make LA or your state safer than other states that punish less and better with their dollars. And when they wheel out their anecdote of the day, wheel out an anecdote about the little girl whose birthday it would have been today but Representative So-and-So voted to waste money on prisons when better options were available.

This will become more and more viable as The Perfect Storm rushes ashore. Note in the article that even now, the sheriffs, seeing what budget disasters are doing to their ability to function (see the first few items of the News below today if you want examples from other states), start backtracking in the face of reality. Even the DAs claim, as always, that they support cost savings without harm to public safety, as they define it anyway. Take away their monopoly on defining it. And an extra few percent off their budgets each year. We’ll see how difficult it is for legislators to do the right thing.

The “fiscal pressures” the article cites as possibly motivating future reform aren’t going away. They’re going to keep eating at state, county, and district finances for years to come, according to analysts who don’t have a book to sell, and that’s usually without taking The Storm into account. That’s ultimately what is truly valuable for the entire country in what the Times-Picayune is doing, even if LA manages to blow it off yet again. The mess that is Corrections Sentencing policy and its 1.0 reforms cannot be sustained in coming years. A clear and well-resourced series like this shows readers the truth of that. If they don’t win the Pulitzer, we can only assume it’s because of that “Picayune” thing.

--Mike Connelly

To those of you who scoffed last week when we called from elimination of practitioners from policy bodies responsible for serious Corrections Sentencing Reform, we offer this wonderful start to a series of stories from Louisiana, as the article says, “the world’s prison capital.” Go read the whole thing, of course, but when you get back, let’s talk about these excerpts:

The hidden engine behind the state's well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.

Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations.

If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars. . . .

Every dollar spent on prisons is a dollar not spent on schools, hospitals and highways. Other states are strategically reducing their prison populations -- using tactics known in policy circles as "smart on crime." Compared with the national average, Louisiana has a much lower percentage of people incarcerated for violent offenses and a much higher percentage behind bars for drug offenses -- perhaps a signal that some nonviolent criminals could be dealt with differently.

Do all of Louisiana's 40,000 inmates need to be incarcerated for the interests of punishment and public safety to be served? Gov. Bobby Jindal, a conservative Republican with presidential ambitions, says the answer is no. Despite locking up more people for longer periods than any other state, Louisiana has one of the highest rates of both violent and property crimes. Yet the state shows no signs of weaning itself off its prison dependence.

"You have people who are so invested in maintaining the present system -- not just the sheriffs, but judges, prosecutors, other people who have links to it," said Burk Foster, a former professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and an expert on Louisiana prisons. "They don't want to see the prison system get smaller or the number of people in custody reduced, even though the crime rate is down, because the good old boys are all linked together in the punishment network, which is good for them financially and politically." . . .

The more empty beds, the more an operation sinks into the red. With maximum occupancy and a thrifty touch with expenses, a sheriff can divert the profits to his law enforcement arm, outfitting his deputies with new squad cars, guns and laptops. Inmates spend months or years in 80-man dormitories with nothing to do and few educational opportunities before being released into society with $10 and a bus ticket.

Fred Schoonover, deputy warden of the 522-bed Tensas Parish Detention Center in northeast Louisiana, says he does not view inmates as a "commodity." But he acknowledges that the prison's business model is built on head counts. Like other wardens in this part of the state, he wheels and deals to maintain his tally of human beings. His boss, Tensas Parish Sheriff Rickey Jones, relies on him to keep the numbers up.

"We struggle. I stay on the phone a lot, calling all over the state, trying to hustle a few," Schoonover said. . . .

More money spent on locking up an ever-growing number of prisoners means less money for the very institutions that could help young people stay out of trouble, giving rise to a vicious cycle. Louisiana spends about $663 million a year to feed, house, secure and provide medical care to 40,000 inmates. Nearly a third of that money -- $182 million -- goes to for-profit prisons, whether run by sheriffs or private companies.

"Clearly, the more that Louisiana invests in large-scale incarceration, the less money is available for everything from preschools to community policing that could help to reduce the prison population," said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national criminal justice reform group. "You almost institutionalize the high rate of incarceration, and it's even harder to get out of that situation." . . .

Tough fiscal times have spurred many states to reduce their prison populations. In lock-'em-up Texas, new legislation is steering low-level criminals into drug treatment and other alternatives to prison.

In Louisiana, even baby steps are met with resistance. Jindal, who rose to the governor's office with the backing of the sheriffs' lobby, says too many people are behind bars. Yet earlier this year, he watered down a reform package hammered out by the Sentencing Commission he himself had convened. The commission includes sheriffs and district attorneys, so its proposals were modest to begin with.

Measures like those in Texas, which target a subset of nonviolent offenders, are frequently lauded but may not be enough. To make a significant dent in the prisoner numbers, sentences for violent crimes must be reduced and more money must be invested in inner-city communities, according to David Cole, a professor at Georgetown Law School. Such large-scale change -- which has not been attempted in any state, let alone Louisiana -- can only happen through political will.

In Louisiana, that will appears to be practically nonexistent. Locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible has enriched a few while making everyone else poorer. Public safety comes second to profits.

"You cannot build your way out of it. Very simply, you cannot build your way out of crime," said Secretary of Corrections Jimmy LeBlanc, who supports reducing the incarceration rate and putting more resources into inmate rehabilitation. "It just doesn't work that way. You can't afford it. Nobody can afford that."

And we’re back live!! Despite the length of what we lifted, there’s much, much more there. This is shaping up to be a phenomenal and hopefully influential series. While no state can match Louisiana in this, EVERY state has some Louisiana in it and suffers from the same present and future depending on how much. Now let’s look at the points we, not they, bolded.

“. . . must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.” To be remembered every time we insist that you cannot, NOT, have private prisons in your state and expect to be able to control your Corrections Sentencing future. Not only can they not be at a reform table, they cannot have access to state policymakers or practitioners. When they do, this happens. Why? “The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars. . . .” The major parts of Oklahoma’s latest reforms [sic] that will actually get implemented will be those that empower and pay the state’s private prison companies.

Not only can private prisons NOT be at the table, none of the other actors whose egos, livelihoods, futures, and power bases will be whacked by real Corrections Sentencing Reform can be there. "You have people who are so invested in maintaining the present system -- not just the sheriffs, but judges, prosecutors, other people who have links to it," said Burk Foster, a former professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and an expert on Louisiana prisons. "They don't want to see the prison system get smaller or the number of people in custody reduced, even though the crime rate is down, because the good old boys are all linked together in the punishment network, which is good for them financially and politically." . . .

The article does manage to make the point that, beyond the other functions of state government that get shafted just to throw money at prisons in LA, other criminal justice does as well, criminal justice that has shown higher payoffs for dollars spent than prison ever has, not that that would be hard in LA. So this isn’t about public safety, it’s pure power politics (which also means that it takes pure power politics, not "consensus" workgroups or commissions to reverse it all). "Clearly, the more that Louisiana invests in large-scale incarceration, the less money is available for everything from preschools to community policing that could help to reduce the prison population," said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national criminal justice reform group. "You almost institutionalize the high rate of incarceration, and it's even harder to get out of that situation." . . .

Want more proof that you get the least common denominator when you let these profiteers, public and private, on the commissions, workgroups, and boards that basically are admissions that nothing “outside the silo” can possible be done? “In Louisiana, even baby steps are met with resistance. Jindal, who rose to the governor's office with the backing of the sheriffs' lobby, says too many people are behind bars. Yet earlier this year, he watered down a reform package hammered out by the Sentencing Commission he himself had convened. The commission includes sheriffs and district attorneys, so its proposals were modest to begin with.” Well, knock us over with a feather.

To sum: “. . . Locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible has enriched a few while making everyone else poorer. Public safety comes second to profits.

"You cannot build your way out of it. Very simply, you cannot build your way out of crime," said Secretary of Corrections Jimmy LeBlanc, who supports reducing the incarceration rate and putting more resources into inmate rehabilitation. "It just doesn't work that way. You can't afford it. Nobody can afford that."”

But you CAN pull every dollar out of every service and investment that makes your state worth living in, worth it to businesses to invest in, until you’ve reached the point where you have nothing left to cut but this mess. And a state that is so wretched that Third World immigrants wouldn’t locate there. As we’ve noted, states like Alabama and Arizona are much more publicly choosing that option, even as, like LA, The Perfect Storm has them targeted for more damage than the states that choose to be smart, like Colorado right now. There’s no way a state as lost as LA can put down enough shovels to save itself, despite the quality of this article. But other states, like yours for instance, can make sure that everyone you know knows that this is their future if you let these people continue to participate in the policymaking and reform processes. They don’t know the world “outside the silo” to provide the necessary ideas for change and they have every incentive to make sure no one else is either. So why are they at a serious reform table???

[One last point from the article that echoes what we have said here since the start of this blog, albeit in different words: “Measures like those in Texas, which target a subset of nonviolent offenders, are frequently lauded but may not be enough. To make a significant dent in the prisoner numbers, sentences for violent crimes must be reduced and more money must be invested in inner-city communities, according to David Cole, a professor at Georgetown Law School. Such large-scale change -- which has not been attempted in any state, let alone Louisiana -- can only happen through political will.” He’s not saying “Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0” when he talks about the insufficiency of the current “reform” efforts, but that’s what he’s saying. And his suggestions for solutions are strictly 2.0, that we strongly advocate here, as is call for proactive leadership and will, not kumbaya consensus that leads to the weak policy and Emperor’s New Status Quo gruel we see in too many states that even claimed to be serious. No, not new stuff, at least for you regular readers, but nice to be affirmed by some big law school guy.]

Since we’ve been following the activities of Oklahoma and Missouri as they deal with [sic] their Corrections Sentencing crises, we should bring down the curtains on their legislative activity for the year now. Here you’ll find the latest cheerleading on Oklahoma’s impotent reforms, which we’ve critiqued so much you can probably lipsynch with us. Note, though, that the projected “savings” over the next decade from “diverted” inmates are, while less after legislation, still more than the state churned out the previous decade for far higher actual increases. Just part of the mirrors and smoke that accompany this whole thing. One more time, the grant money will be funneled into existing activities to offset local budget cuts, the state DOC will end up spending more money, not less, privatization reigns, and within a decade or so from now, if Oklahoma will launch its third “reform” to try to control its overloaded prison populations.

As for Missouri, you’ll note from this story on how its Hatfield/McCoy House/Senate (and both are Republican) managed a budget that only cut the blind $3 million instead of $28, took casino money from pre-schools and gave it to veterans, and replaced the pre-school money with tobacco settlement cash (IOW, neither of the latter two gets general revenue, good luck with that). This from a state whose prison pops have been level for five years and are projected to decline in the next five but couldn’t come up with reform that would guarantee even a million in savings over the next five years.

Sure Thing Prediction. Both of these states will appear in the next promotional literature as successes by all the orgs engaged in Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0.

Caveat emptor.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.—John F. Kennedy

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Our book review on Sunday (coming attractions!!!) details not only many of the elements and effects of The Perfect Storm in this country but also how fast they will be upon us. As if the way they’re already whacking us hadn’t made it all clear. We don’t have time for the famous “incremental,” “bipartisan,” “consensus” approaches that have marked Corrections Sentencing policy from the first guidelines commissions through today’s justice reinvestment activities. At their best (which are less than 50-50 in states anymore, as MO and OK have just proven to offset the possible success in GA), they don’t make the adjustments necessary to get prison populations down to the levels that The Storm will force (already is forcing) upon state budgets. The only way to get to those levels is to set goals, hard goals, not easy ones, build new systems, and restructure old ones, all of what Kennedy was talking about in his famous NASA speech.

Jim Austin says we can hit 50% prison population reductions without major impact on public safety. Is he right? Don’t know, but some large percentage can be hit, we know from the available research. So let’s set a goal, our own “moonshot” so to speak—XX% reduction in each of our state’s prison populations by the year 2020 with no change or reductions in crime rates. That is, for 2020, we will start right now the planning and processes to close enough prisons to have XX, XXX fewer inmates in that year. Not “oh, what can we do?” but “we’re hitting this target not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, because hitting that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”

But how, oh, how? As we earlier posted here, Austin and Todd Clear have said it could be done with a combo of cutting time served back to averages of 1988, diverting tech violations from prison, and eliminating mandatories for drug crimes. Cook and Ludwig argue for shorter but more certain punishments, taxing the bejeezus (our term, not theirs) out of things we want people to stop using, more private efforts like LoJacks and Business Improvement Districts, increasing the compulsory school age to keep older teens off the streets, and working on social and cognitive skill interventions. Peter Moskos offers the possibility of renewed corporal punishment that, even if barbaric (unlike sending people behind bars years and decades beyond what is done even in different parts of the same state, much less other states or the rest of the world we compare ourselves to), I guarantee will empty quite a few cells and with vengeful victims more satisfied than now (and taxes being paid by the offender, not spent on them).

We here at JCO have offered ten possible options to mix and match: Best Practice correctional and court management, TECHNOCORRECTIONS, decriminalization not only of drugs but other property offenses, moving substance abuse to public health for remedies where it belongs, mental health community services, turning current “crimes” over to civil and community remedies, identifying the maximum “public safety sentences” that are associated with the highest decline in recidivism (hint: they will be lower than most of the average sentences for those offenses), and splitting responsibility for the public safety component of a sentence to the state and the “community values” (aka retribution) component to the county of conviction. Clearly, these aren’t the only options out there and the elements can vary from state to state as necessary. But tell us that packages of these proposals wouldn’t immediately move us toward the XX% reduction with positive public safety by 2020.

Can’t do them? The public won’t consent? The practitioners won’t “buy in”? Look each of those ideas over again. Where in them do you find anything that DAs, defense bar, judges, all the folks who don’t know what to do or wouldn’t support the challenges to their status quos, would have to agree to? All of them build or restructure the system to take those players off the field, as they will have to be for serious change. Corrections will have to be part of a few, but orgs like ACA and NIC are already leading the profession that direction. Everything listed above can be done by statute, most of it outside the screwed-up criminal processing system that has gotten us to this mess today.

“But, but . . . no one will get elected on that kind of platform.” When the options are cutting school budgets even more? Thousands of dollars every year on repairing your car? More and more children sick and dying from contaminated food products? Driving off bridges that suddenly aren’t there? The future outlined in the book review Sunday (more coming attractions!!)?

Policymakers in TX, KY, CT did. It is impossible to see either of the Kennedy brothers (and I am not a fan overall of either of them despite my fondness for their quotes) accepting that. Or LBJ. Or Nixon. Or any of the real leaders of this country back when it operated on confidence and accomplishment rather than fear and spin. Real leaders today could do, have done the same. They have a majority of the public in some states right now, most states within 2-3 years, some states admittedly never (AL and AZ leading that pack). It will take challenging us, daring us, setting hard goals, not easy ones. Leadership. The alternative is the leaderless miasma that has gotten us where we are, an alternative that will clearly be untenable and destructive to public safety as well as our general community well-being within the next few years. If it’s not clear already.

Set high hard prison population and public safety goals for Corrections Sentencing in 2020. Bring together the people who will have to put it into action, not the obstacle-makers, and tell them “we don’t care what you do (as long as it’s legal), just pick from the options or come up with your own, and get us to the numbers or better on or before 2020.” Some people said Kennedy was crazy for pulling that stunt with the moon landing. Couldn’t be done.

Except it was. This can be, too. Just ask another real leader: You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now.-- Harry Truman

[Additional thought in support by Ronald Wright, the historian, from A Short History of Progress:

. . .There's a saying in Argentina that each night God cleans up the mess the Argentines made by day. This seems to be what our leaders are counting on. But it won't work. Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don't do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.

The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.
We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of the reach of rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.

Now is our last chance to get the future right.

IOW, it’s “one bite at the apple,” not “half a loaf this time.” Kennedy and Truman would understand.]

--Mike Connelly

A trio of state tough budget stories today that seem to have a common underlying remedy to them if we could only think of it.  Let’s see, the state with the highest incarceration rate in the nation, about twice as high as the national average, can’t find any obvious way to get its state expenses down.  A state that has had no prison population growth in five years and predicts a decline over the next few looks to whack the blind rather than veterans.  A state with over two decades of extensive voluntary sentencing guidelines is looking at a “doomsday” budget if it can’t get its act together and figure out where to find defensible and smart areas to cut. Seems like they all not only are dealing with similar problems but could resolve them at least in part in the same way. If only we could figure out what that might be . . . .

--Mike Connelly

I promised in today’s News below that I had a bit more to say about what has happened to Missouri’s efforts at Corrections Sentencing reform, not that such a promise is particularly important.  [Disclaimer: I participated in a minor way in the proceedings but was conspicuously not influential once you read what they’ve decided.  And, no, this is not sour grapes.  My grapes were sweet, theirs aren’t even bad raisins.]  Let’s review what occurred in the process there.

Missouri put together a voting workgroup of the usual suspects for such things, then added an advisory group of some more such folks but including county people, victims reps, etc. They met for several months, got the usual presentations and soliloquies regarding public safety and evidence-based practice, heard about the situation the state faced, including an expected level or declining state prison population over the near term.  In the end, as we’ve noted, they produced a very weak version of what’s happened in other states but with a precedent-setting proposal to leave behind an oversight committee to verify actual savings before committing them to “reinvestment” and to monitor and adjust the implementation of the group’s recs.  The oversight survived, but in the end, the projected savings after the weak proposal had several gallons of water added to it would be $168, 657.  “Possibly more” over five years.  (Don’t you love the specificity of the amount??  Where are the “and X cents”?)

I mentioned above one problem Missouri had that other states going through the process generally don’t. Because of previous laws and programs, the state was not looking at a growing prison population; therefore, the usual “we’ll save $X millions by diverting offenders from prison” wasn’t there to induce fear.  The status quo there is projected by the DOC stat guy to be further decline.  But, you say, didn’t that give the workgroup incentive to say, “how could we expand on that so that we could get to actually close a prison or two so that we’d have even more money for reinvestment?” 

Well, as we cited in the News below and talked about in the past, this is a state currently deciding on whether it should whack the blind, preschools, veterans, or Medicaid in order to save $30 million.  Gee, what might cost $30 m. or so a year to operate?  Gosh, if only there were something easy to find . . . . IOW, the irony of MO’s legislature cutting aid to the blind should not be lost.  (As a poli sci guy, I do find it morbidly amusing to watch two Republicans, leaders of each house, call each other liars in the press.  The Dem governor must chuckle all the way to those would-be Republican contributors’ dinners.)

While this article actually does a better job on the details of what passed, including the oversight committee, this article accidentally and inadvertently tells you why the bill ended up making gruel look good.  And why not only this effort but most Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0 efforts like it across the country in the future will be more likely to turn out like it. The answer is buried near the bottom of the article (if the link doesn’t get you the quote below, google McCulloch and his state bar position and add “Kentucky” since later versions had cut this section):

"We're very happy with the bill as it is now," said McCulloch, president of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys.

Some states, such as Kentucky, went too far, McCulloch said, by requiring that the state's prison population be reduced by several thousand people.

"The easiest thing is to empty prisons," the prosecutor said. "You just start paroling people. But that hurts public safety. We wanted to make sure we stayed away from that."

Three points.  First, McCulloch was a member of that advisory group which was presented very thorough documentation of the public safety benefits, based on real evidence from research, of what states like Kentucky had done.  I know. I was there.  If there is evidence of anything regarding outcomes, it’s not that when “you just start paroling people . . . that hurts public safety.” At least not the way KY has legislated. And where is his evidence that KY hurt its public safety by its actions?  Nada. Zip.  Pure faith-based fact-free bushwa, thrown out by someone institutionally and psychologically incapable of accepting facts that don’t correspond with his professional interests and erroneous worldview.  Ask yourself what evidence and data it would take to make him reverse that statement when he was shown what was already out there.  That’s why we make our point about not expecting Corrections Sentencing Reform 1.0, with its emphasis on EBP and tying policy to actual performance rather than the stories people already have in their heads, to have the kind of impact that will be required for the triage brought on by The Perfect Storm.  “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, ooh la la la . . . “ Or, if you prefer Mark Twain, “You tell me where a man gets his cornpone, and I'll tell you what his opinions are.”

Second,you know who got the bill as weak as it was and then well watered after.  The St. Louis DA’s citing of KY is not something he pulled out of the blue.  KY was certainly never discussed in that way in ANY of the workgroup or advisory group meetings.  This view came from talking with others, most likely the network of DAs around the country who have made it their business, as usual, to kill even 1.0 reform.  The ones who poisoned the process in Indiana when something serious was attempted there. We talk here of good DAs we’ve worked with, “angel” types, and then the “archangels” who have convinced themselves that there is no other way than that which they approve and they get approval directly from God.  The latter drive the policy positions of all of them because even “angel” DAs are rarely immune from attacks by the archangels for not being on the side of God. So the former keep quiet and the latter drive the bus.  Expect this to happen in every state trying the “consensus” approach that gives the greatest power to the one who holds out longest and threatens the most.

Third, obviously related to both above, this also shows why DAs cannot be part of a serious reform process, why those “workgroups” like commissions and councils that include them, cannot be expected to get anything more done than what St. Louis DA types find ideologically (certainly not empirically) acceptable.  Don’t get us wrong.  Defense attorneys have done as much harm to justice with their “it’s okay to let guilty walk” approach as DAs do with their “it’s okay to lock up the innocent,” no matter how much gravy they use to cover their respective self-justifications.  There are better alternatives to the mess they’ve created.  Neither they nor judges who overwhelmingly come from the two groups should be allowed community-responsible public safety decision-making.  MO is just the latest example of why.  It did take an Einstein to figure out, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”  Can they be involved to provide feedback?  If they publicly pledge to be serious about change.  But they can’t be given vested interest, silo-ed and blindered vetoes. Even “angel” ones, as noted, cannot be trusted not to spout the party line.  Just leave them off.

“What about buy-in?!?!” Sod that.  They’re public officials.  They either follow the law or they get outed.  Make the laws and hold them to it.  Write sanctions for mal- or misfeasance into the law.  They can’t live with it, the world wasn’t created to make them happy in their career choices.  It’s the same philosophy the US Congress used to blow away opposition to federal guidelines, and that held up despite the overwhelming lack of buy-in.  And yes, I realize I just used the federal guidelines as a positive example of something.  I promise it will never happen again. 

The point here is that the MO experience shows why Corrections Sentencing Reform 2.0 is necessary now and why it cannot come using the tired and untrue approaches to “team decision-making.”  We’ve shown the research here on the dysfunctions of teams in actual successful decisions.  They only work when the team is given and held ruthlessly to a specific task and deadline to get plans laid out to a pre-set goal.  Members can’t handle it,they get removed or replaced.  When you have to triage, as we do now in the first blasts of The Perfect Storm, you don’t have time or resources to let gamers screw with the process or ideologues play “my way, highway” to favor their constituents over the overall community.

MO is being hailed as a success by the gamers and ideologues as well as some unfortunately sincere people who haven’t realized yet how much they failed to do.  They will, and soon.  The question is, how many other states will go through the same failure-as-success before we start taking the steps that will get us to the other side of The Storm?