Pubdate: Sun, 27 Feb 2005
Source: Mobile Register (AL)
Copyright: 2005 Mobile Register
Contact:  http://www.al.com/mobileregister/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/269
Author: Brendan Kirby
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)

PAROLES ARE UP, BUT ALABAMA PRISONS ARE STILL OVERCROWDED

Short on money, out of prison space and running out of time, Alabama 
launched its boldest social experiment in decades: increasing paroles by 
thousands of inmates.

On one level, the plan begun almost two years ago has been a resounding 
success. The parole board has released 4,174 prisoners from a special 
docket of nonviolent offenders that was set up in April 2003. Parole 
officials said most have found jobs and, so far at least, stayed out of 
trouble.

The plan also has been a quiet disappointment. Despite shedding all those 
inmates -- on top of the 1,820 paroled through the normal process and the 
more than 13,500 whose sentences ended or who started the probation portion 
of a split sentence -- Alabama's overcrowded prison system stands only 
slightly better off than it did a year ago.

With 23,874 inmates jammed into state prisons, work release centers and 
boot camps, the prison system has almost twice the 12,943 inmates it was 
designed to house.

That doesn't include another 3,370 people who are waiting to be transferred 
from county jails, are serving time in privately run prisons in other 
states or are housed in alternative arrangements.

And police in some cities, including Mobile, have complained about an 
increase in car break-ins, burglaries and other property crimes following 
the stepped-up paroles, although an explosion in violent crime that some 
predicted has not materialized.

"I don't think anybody assumed that this would relieve the crowding 
conditions. That's not the intent of the second board," said Donal 
Campbell, who became Alabama's corrections commissioner when Gov. Bob Riley 
took office in January 2003.

The "second board" is a three-member panel appointed by Riley that began 
hearing cases in December 2003. The idea was to speed consideration of 
parole for thousands of eligible prisoners, giving freedom months or years 
earlier to those judged to pose the least risk to the community.

One of the first to face the new board was Valentino Arso, a 39-year-old 
Mobile native serving a life sentence for a 1996 auto theft. The judge 
meted out such stiff punishment because of Arso's criminal record, which 
includes convictions on drug and first-degree assault charges. The assault 
charge stemmed from a 1989 shooting at his grandmother's home in Prichard, 
which Arso maintains amounted to self-defense against a burglar.

The new parole board granted Arso's release in December 2003. He said 
during a recent interview that he dove into every prison rehabilitation 
program he could find.

"During my confinement, I received God into my life. And it changed my 
life," he said. "I got myself in trouble. I'm not going to put it on anyone 
else. ... You've got thousands and thousands in there that won't admit 
their problem."

Now living in Whistler, Arso said he's earning his commercial driver's 
license and hopes to work as a truck driver and give talks to youths. His 
parole officer, Monica Norwood, said Arso so far has made the grade. His 
only infraction in the last year has been a fine for failure to have his 
grandchild in a car seat.

Some academics and advocates maintain that Alabama's prisons -- and those 
in other states -- are filled with thousands of people like Arso who can 
safely be released as long as they have access to the right drug treatment, 
education and job training programs to break their criminal habits.

Those reformers argue that America's incarceration rate, among the highest 
in the developed world, is unwise and that it's smarter and cheaper in the 
long run to attack the root causes of crime. Especially, they say, since 
about 95 percent of all prisoners will one day be released.

Advocates for reducing prison populations said states ought to start early 
release with the inmates serving time for property or drug offenses. In 
Alabama, such inmates make up more than 43 percent of the total, according 
to the Department of Corrections.

"Unfortunately, what we're doing in our country -- and it's not just 
Alabama -- is we're incarcerating a lot of people who aren't dangerous," 
said Robert Sigler, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama.

Alabama's governor, a conservative Republican who has long taken a 
traditional law-and-order stance, would seem an improbable candidate to 
engineer such a radical reordering of the criminal justice system.

During his campaign two years ago, Riley publicly toyed with the idea of 
prison privatization.

As governor, Riley's foray into prison reform was a matter of necessity. He 
inherited a corrections system that many experts concur was badly 
underfunded and overcrowded. Judges at both the federal and state levels 
have ordered the state to reduce the overcrowding.

Upon taking office in 2003, Riley offered a plan to address funding 
shortages in the prison system and throughout state government: a complex 
proposal to raise a variety of taxes and impose new ones. All told, the 
proposal was expected to generate $1.2 billion when fully phased in.

But voters trounced the idea in a referendum, leaving Riley to craft a Plan 
B. That included the stepped-up paroles, the three additional board members 
and more parole and probation officers to supervise the newly released.

The increased paroles made an immediate impact. With the changes in place a 
little more than six months, the state posted a 31 percent increase in 
paroles from 2002 to 2003. That was the second-highest percentage increase 
in the nation, behind only North Dakota, according to a U.S. Justice 
Department report prepared last summer.

Although it was more dramatic in Alabama than in most other states, the 
increase in paroles mirrors a nationwide trend. After steady declines 
during most of the 1990s, fueled by a movement toward "truth in sentencing" 
and the abolition of parole in several states, numbers have begun to creep 
back up over the last few years.

According to figures compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003 saw 
the largest increase in America's parole population since 1992, which saw a 
7.4 percent jump from the previous year.

Lauren Glaze, a statistician with the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 
attributed the increase to attempts by states to deal with budget 
pressures. She said they have employed a variety of strategies, including 
increasing the number of intermediate sanctions and exercising greater 
reluctance to imprison "technical" parole violators -- people who fail drug 
tests or break other parole rules but who do not commit new crimes.

"We know that's happening. We don't know to what extent," she said. "It 
remains to be seen what's going to happen at this point."

Few dispute that the state's prison system had reached a breaking point. 
Calling the situation a "ticking time bomb," U.S. District Judge Myron 
Thompson ruled in December 2003 that overcrowding made the Julia Tutwiler 
Prison for Women in Wetumpka "unconstitutionally unsafe."

The federal judge's ruling came on the heels of a May 2001 ruling by 
Montgomery County Circuit Judge William Shashy that the Department of 
Corrections was breaking state law by allowing prisoners to languish in 
county jails for months after their convictions.

Campbell, the state corrections commissioner, said prisons become more 
difficult to manage when they're overcrowded. Alabama's penitentiaries are 
so stuffed, he said, that many have waiting lists for solitary confinement.

That limits a warden's options in imposing discipline, Campbell said.

"When we have problems within prisons, there's no place to lock them up. 
You need to have a jail within a jail," he said. "We have very good 
employees. ... But they can only do so much. They need the tools and 
resources to do the job."

Alabama Chief Assistant Attorney General Rosa Davis, who also sits on the 
Alabama Sentencing Commission, said the Department of Corrections has tried 
for years to get by with less, more so than virtually any other prison 
system in the country.

She cited statistics showing that Alabama has among the most overcrowded 
prison systems and the highest ratio of inmates to corrections officers in 
the country. The result is that the state's cost per inmate is about $26 a 
day, compared with the daily averages of about $62 per inmate nationally 
and $40 in the Southeast.

A report by the Southern Legislative Conference shows Alabama's per-inmate 
funding ranks last among 16 states in the region.

"Look at that picture," Davis said. "What does it tell you? We're the most 
efficient prison system in the country or the most underfunded in the 
country. We're getting what we pay for: a good school for crime."

The increased paroles have helped Alabama reduce its prison population by 
1,185 inmates from its all-time high of 28,440 in June 2003. But some 
prison officials contend that relief has come from parts of the system that 
needed it the least.

A majority of the new parolees have come from work-release centers and a 
low-security boot camp. Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett 
said that should come as no surprise: Prisoners eligible for programs 
requiring minimal supervision make the most attractive candidates for early 
release.

"What you have is the Department of Corrections and the parole board all of 
a sudden are competing for the same pool of inmates," he said.

As a result, Alabama's work release population has declined by more than 
half, from 3,359 in June 2003 to 1,628 now.

But the prisons themselves actually have more inmates now than a year ago, 
running at about twice designed capacity.

"Our major prison facilities are still overcrowded. We haven't seen any 
relief in our major institutions," Corbett said.

Moreover, he said, the decline of work-release inmates has robbed the 
department of a vital income source. The Legislature last fiscal year gave 
the prison system $266 million, about $45 million shy of its operating budget.

The prisons make up the difference a variety of ways, including charging 
inmates for use of the telephone and the canteen, profits from prison 
industries and federal grants. The largest source of funding, Corbett said, 
traditionally has come from the 40 percent the system takes from the 
salaries of prisoners on work release.

"Our inmate population is beginning to rise again," he said. "In large 
part, the parole board has exhausted the vast majority of people eligible 
for parole under their criteria. Unless you go back and change the 
fundamental reasons why the inmate population is going up, it's eventually 
going to start going back up."

Cynthia Dillard, assistant executive director of the parole board, said of 
the early parolees, "A majority of those people are paying taxes now 
because they are required to have jobs, and they are raising their children."

Of the 4,174 granted early release, the board has revoked parole of 471, 
either for committing new crimes or violating parole rules. That's a 
recidivism rate of 11.2 percent.

"It's still unrealistically low. ... We expect it to go up," said parole 
board Director William Segrest.

By contrast, according to statistics compiled by the Department of 
Corrections, 37 percent of all Alabama inmates released in 1999 were back 
in prison by 2002. Among those released on parole, it was 22 percent.

Parole board officials attribute the early success rate to their 
selectivity. The 4,174 parolees comprise about 43 percent of the 9,703 
inmates considered for early release, Dillard said.

Allen Tapley, who served as director of the Alabama Administrative Office 
of Courts from 1977 to 1991, said a financially broken criminal justice 
system should always look to parole for relief. While the daily cost to 
imprison an Alabamian is $26 a day, parole and probation cost less than $2 
a day.

Even intensive parole, with electronic monitoring and frequent contacts 
with a parole officer, costs about $10 a day, Tapley said.

"Your parole and probation officer is your cheapest, safest form of 
corrections," he said.

The problem, according to parole board officials, is that they have run out 
of nonviolent offenders to consider for parole.

"We have considered everyone in the prison system. Now we're concentrating 
on the backlog of violent cases," Segrest said.

Some critics also fault Alabama's habitual offender law, which mandates 
longer sentences for repeat offenders. While such measures enjoy strong 
support from the public, detractors maintain that the result is that 
less-dangerous inmates often serve the longest sentences.

"We get life sentences for nonviolent offenses," Dillard said. "Probably 
the majority of our sentences over 15 years are for nonviolent offenses."

Some law enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges expressed outrage in 
December 2003 when they learned of some of the prisoners who were getting 
parole hearings. Some of them were drug dealers given 20- and 25-year 
sentences, and they were being considered after just a few years.

Some got hearings after about six months in prison.

Randall Hillman, executive director of the Alabama District Attorneys 
Association, said that offers little deterrent to a hard-core drug dealer.

"He goes back to the street. It's the cost of doing business," Hillman said.

The law ordering stepped-up paroles instructed the board to consider every 
nonviolent case that met the criteria. Even though board members denied 
parole for many of those people, Baldwin County District Attorney David 
Whetstone said the state sent a bad message in even hearing their cases.

"You get some people who shouldn't even be up for review," he said in a 
recent interview. "We've got bureaucrats trying to figure out how prisoners 
should be released instead of sheriffs and DAs and judges."

The impact of increased paroles on crime is difficult to gauge.

Although the recidivism rate of recent parolees has been low, Mobile Police 
Chief Sam Cochran pointed to statistics showing a slight increase in crime 
in the city last year after declines in five of the six previous years. The 
increase was particularly pronounced for certain property crimes, including 
burglary (6.1 percent) and auto theft (13.9 percent).

"I think there's a correlation that we've seen in the increase in property 
crimes that we've begun to see," Cochran said. "I think there's a 
connection. Now how do we prove that? Well, we've arrested a number of 
people on parole for burglarizing buildings. ... We've arrested dozens and 
dozens of people on parole."

Miriam Shehane, director of a Montgomery-based group called Victims of 
Crime and Leniency said the public's impression of Riley's parole reform 
was that the second panel would consider only nonviolent offenders.

"But that has not been the case, and the legislation doesn't specify that," 
she said. "I do think they've paroled some that they should not have paroled."

Shehane said she believes parole board members have been under tremendous 
pressure to release inmates in order to relieve overcrowding.

And, she said, the people making those decisions had never heard parole 
cases before they were appointed and had no frame of reference.

"I don't think they were experienced enough," she said.

Over the summer, Melanie Lowery became Exhibit A for victim' rights advocates.

Lowery admitted to killing her husband of four years, Jackie Lowery, after 
trying unsuccessfully to hire a hit man in 1990. The victim's brother, 
Gadsden resident Jerry Lowery, recalled the shock of his brother's death 
turning to anger when he learned that the motive was simple greed: a 
lucrative life insurance policy that was set to expire.

As part of her plea bargain, Melanie Lowery received a 30-year prison 
sentence, and Jerry Lowery said he figured his brother's killer would spend 
most of her life behind bars.

But when her case came up for parole in August, the second parole board -- 
the new one appointed by Riley -- voted 2-1 to release her.

"It was unbelievable because there was nothing said in her defense why she 
should be released except she had been studying electronics while in prison 
and she was a model prisoner," Jerry Lowery said.

The decision caused an uproar. Attorney General Troy King and the governor 
joined the police chief and the district attorney involved in the case in 
urging the board to reconsider. Some 5,000 citizens wrote letters opposing 
the parole.

Under pressure, the board convened a second hearing and voted unanimously 
to reverse its decision and keep Melanie Lowery in prison.

"I know that the prisons are overcrowded, but that's not the victims' fault 
and the victims' families' fault," Lowery said. "But, yet, they give them 
(the board) the power to overturn a judge's or a jury's decision."

Shehane said she believes the second parole board has strayed from its duty 
to assess the potential risks of releasing an inmate.

"Sometimes, we felt they've retried the cases," said Shehane, who became 
active in the victims' rights movement after her daughter was murdered 
nearly three decades ago. "I don't think their role is to determine guilt 
or innocence. A jury has already determined that."

Inmates whose paroles have been denied will not get a second shot until 
their next regularly scheduled hearing, under a decision the board made 
after it exhausted the special docket. As a result, at least until 2006 
when the board is supposed to disband, it will continue to hear regularly 
scheduled violent cases along with the original board. That means, 
essentially, twice as many people are considering the same number of cases.

Some folks have suggested the second parole board finish sooner. "In our 
judgment, that board has accomplished what it was asked to do," said 
Hillman of the district attorneys group.

Dillard said the biggest problem facing parole officials is not a lack of 
board members but the strict rules governing victim notification. The state 
is required to notify victims at least 30 days before an inmate is up for 
parole.

"We have to locate them. It's just so time-consuming," she said. "Some of 
these are very old cases, and female victims, especially, change their names."

The backlog, as high as 6,000 at one point, now stands at about 5,000. That 
means inmates up for parole sometimes must wait a year for hearings.

All things considered, Tapley, the former Administrative Office of Courts 
director, said the extra parole board is good for the system.

"For the longest time, because of a lack of staff and three parole board 
members, we did not have an active parole process," he said. "Three people 
could not get that job done. ... An active parole system has always been 
needed, and this gave it the boost it needed."
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