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California Prisons Report: A Look Inside with Hastings Scholar Hadar Aviram

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Despite a year of legal sanctions and budget cuts, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation takes an upbeat tone in its new annual report. Inspirationally titled “Corrections Moving Forward” [25 mb PDF], the report opens with a letter from the CDCR secretary Matthew Cate, who writes that “in the midst of significant challenges, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has quietly had a remarkable string of successes in the last year. While it is easy to focus on the negative, there have been many positive developments at our agency.”

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A Pound of Cure: Tracy Velazquez on Prisons and National Health Care Reform

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Tracy Velazquez of the Justice Policy Institute said national health-care reform could keep people out of jail. “Every year, thousands of people are locked up in U.S. prisons and jails because they do not have access to health care to treat mental illness and drug addiction,” she wrote. “Prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities are now some of the largest providers of mental health services in the country.” In conversation with Newsdesk.org, Velazquez, whose Washington, D.C.-based think tank considers “tough on crime” policies to have largely failed, said the costs of incarceration greatly outweigh the price of preventive health care. Bernice Yeung: Tell us more about the connection between health care reform and criminal justice policy.

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Is Schwarzenegger’s Prison Plan Good Enough?

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
Facing a court-ordered deadline to reduce overcrowded state prison populations, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released a plan last Friday (PDF) that would revisit a previously rejected “early release” program, along with other measures. Early release would place elderly, medically infirm inmates and some prisoners with less than 12 months left to serve on their sentence under house arrest with GPS monitoring. Thus, an elderly or ill inmate could be “housed” in a hospital or treatment center. Previously, Newsdesk.org reported that California’s underfunded public health systems are already struggling to absorb existing parolees, and that local officials fear that situation will worsen as the state tries to meet the court-imposed mandate to lower the prison population by 40,000 over the next two years. The state estimates that early release, also known as “alternative custody,” could reduce the prison population by 4,800 inmates, but the measure was rejected by the California assembly earlier this month due to public-safety concerns.

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After Prison, Calif. Women Find No Care

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
Women parolees in San Francisco and Alameda counties face long waiting lists for access to health and welfare services, many of which are unreachable by the phone numbers in official resource guides, according to a recent survey by prisoner advocates. A lack of adequate social services has already challenged California counties dealing with an increased number of parolees — and the problem is expected to only get worse, with a court order requiring the state to ease overcrowded prison populations by 40,000 people over the next two years. A look at the services available to women parolees reveals a difficult situation that is only getting worse. Unreachable by phone
This August, All of Us or None, a national advocacy organization of ex-prisoners, teamed with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners to survey the East Bay and San Francisco housing programs for women listed in the parolee resource guide given to inmates upon release. Published by the City of Oakland’s Private Industries Council, the guide — one of the few of its kind — listed 17 East Bay housing options listed, 10 of which weren’t reachable by phone; in San Francisco, four of the 11 housing options were unreachable.

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Courts Push Back on California Prisons

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
How will California resolve its chronic prison overcrowding problems? With court-imposed deadlines ahead, the answer is as murky as ever. Sept. 18 Deadline Looms
In August, following class-action litigation filed by California inmates, a federal court found that the state’s prisoners were receiving Constitutionally sub-par health and mental health care because of overcrowding, and issued an order requiring the inmate population to be lowered by more than 40,000 over the next two years. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger filed a motion to delay the order, which the district court denied; a further appeal filed with the U.S. Supreme Court was also turned down last week.

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Calif. Prison Woes Tracked in Newspaper’s Interactive Maps

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
The Sacramento Bee has posted some new online maps in advance of the potential release of 27,000 California inmates due to budget cuts, and another 40,000 thanks to a federal court order to curb prison overcrowding. Last week’s map, “An overview of California prisons,” reveals the capacity of prisons throughout the state, as well as prisoner demographics and stats on their crimes, simply by rolling your mouse over each facility listed. According to the map, the California Medical Facility in Vacaville is the least overcrowded, at 118 percent of capacity. Meanwhile, the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy is the most overcrowded, operating at 233 percent above capacity. Earlier this month, the Bee also published the interactive map, “Counties with the most residents in prison,” which notes that Kings County has highest ratio of its residents in prison with 9.4 inmates per 1,000 county residents.

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Better Health Care, Better Prisons?

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
In a recent New York Times op-ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof cites the case of Curtis Wilkerson as an example of lopsided budget priorities (“Priority Test: Health Care or Prisons?”), wherein health care is considered too expensive, yet long and costly prison terms are the norm. Wilkerson, you see, is a California inmate who became entangled in the state’s three-strikes laws; he’s now serving a life sentence for stealing a $2.50 pair of socks (strike one and two both involved abetting a robbery in 1981 when he was 19). California doles out $49,000 a year on each inmate housed in a state prison, and $216,000 a year on each young person incarcerated through the juvenile justice system, Kristof notes, while in contrast, the Bay Area’s Urban Strategies Council has found that only $8,000 is spent on each Oakland public school student. Prison spending has been growing for decades in California and across the country [PDF], along with incarceration rates, under the “tough on crime” banner. Yet as many public-policy makers are beginning to realize, being tough on crime doesn’t mean that they’re being safer or smarter about it.

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Alameda Plans Ahead for Parolee Surge

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
With 40,000 inmates slated for release in the next two years due a federal court order targeting overcrowding in California prisons, what to do with all those convicts re-entering society is at the top of peoples’ minds. (In fact, the state has to come up with a plan of action by mid-September, although it will likely appeal the order.)
This is on top of the nearly 140,000 inmates released annually to California communities. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has also indicated that he’d consider the early release of even more inmates to help cut $1.2 billion from the state budget. For years, the state’s more savvy cities and counties have convened reentry task forces to improve public safety by helping parolees transition more smoothly. One of the most proactive efforts comes out of Alameda County — which receives about 7,000 parolees a year — and which has paid particular attention to the health and mental health needs of the formerly incarcerated.

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Prisons & Public Health: Lois Davis Connects the Dots

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
Fresh from lockup and battling a host of health problems — including chronic illness, addiction and mental illness — a majority of California parolees wind up in a handful of cities like Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego. But here’s the rub: Parolees often can’t get the services they need because they’re going back to low-income communities where health services are “severely strained,” according to a recent RAND Corporation study. The study also says that access to care for minority parolees also tends to be uneven. For example, African Americans living in Los Angeles and Alameda counties had less access to hospitals than Latino or white parolees, while in Kern and San Diego counties, Latino parolees had the least access. I spoke with Lois Davis, the lead researcher on the RAND study, which mapped where parolees go after they’re released, and analyzed — for the first time — California’s safety net of medical, mental health and addiction services available to parolees in their communities.