Pubdate: Mon, 28 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) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth) PRISON CROWDING DEFIES EASY FIXES The problems facing Alabama's overcrowded and underfunded prisons are too big, too complex and too long-lived to be fixed with any single solution, according to experts both inside and outside the system. After Gov. Bob Riley pushed the early release of more than 4,000 inmates, Alabama's prisons remain nearly as overcrowded as they were when the governor launched the program almost two years ago. Experts point to a number of other steps Alabama must take to get a handle on its overcrowding problem, including re forming sentences, expanding community-based corrections programs, improving supervision of people on parole and probation and building additional prisons. "We're not going to solve the problem until we change the sentencing system," said Rosa Davis, the state's chief assistant attorney general and a member of the Alabama Sentencing Commission. "There's not enough gold in Fort Knox to build the prisons we'd have to have." A big reason Alabama's prisons are so overcrowded is that the state doles out harsher punishments than most other states. The state has the nation's fifth-highest incarceration rate and the 11th-longest sentences imposed, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It ranks 14th in the country in actual time spent behind bars. Joseph Colquitt, a retired judge who chairs the Sentencing Commission, said prison terms in Alabama run long because judges and prosecutors lack confidence in the system. Judges often hand down much longer sentences than they believe are justified, he said, in an attempt to compensate for the time off prisoners get for good behavior and parole. "No one knows how long someone is going to serve. So they try to calculate what they think will happen," Colquitt said. "The problem is, he might go down to the penitentiary and not get paroled." Statistics show that Alabama locks up a great number of drug offenders. Of the state's current prisoners, 43.6 percent committed either a property or a drug offense. Crimes against individuals account for 51.6 percent of inmates. According to a 2003 Sentencing Commission report looking at the state's inmates admitted from fiscal years 1999 through 2002, the last detailed examination of the prison population, the most common felony for which prisoners were sentenced was drug possession. Second-degree theft and DUI ranked No. 2 and 3, respectively. Alabama ranked second to Alaska in the percentage of prisoners undergoing drug and alcohol treatment, a fact that some experts said suggests the state is locking up people who should be in community-based treatment programs. Brian Corbett, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections, said about 1,500 inmates are on a waiting list to get into substance-abuse programs because there are not enough counselors or classes to meet the demand. "You can only have so many prisons and so many beds. What are you going to use them for?" Colquitt asked. "Are you going to reserve them for violent offenders? If so, you need some other way to address the nonviolent offenders." But Patrick Halliday, a University of Alabama professor who spent 10 years as a warden in the prison system, said he worries that early paroles will free inmates before they have been able to kick drug and alcohol addictions. "Most of these are going to need the programs we offer. ... And we're not going to be able to do it because we just don't have enough time," he said. More Than Crime It's not just crime that fuels Alabama's prison population. Many of the inmates who leave on parole are destined to return. About a third of those whose paroles have been revoked since the end of April 2003 did not commit new crimes. They violated other terms of their parole. In exchange for the privilege of parole, released prisoners must keep jobs, maintain contact with parole officers and stay off drugs. Failure to com ply with the rules can result in a parole revocation, sending the parolee back to prison to serve the balance of his original sentence. Reform advocates said the parole board members and officers should have much slower trigger fingers when dealing with these so-called "technical" violators. "It's so expensive to continue to supervise dope addicts who may get sent back to prison for dirty urine," said Davis, the chief assistant attorney general and Sentencing Commission member. Parole officers said they have cut their clients more slack over the past year and a half. However, they added, the system will break down if parolees learn there are no consequences for skirting the requirements of their release. Take Juanita Bettis. She could be the poster child for reform advocates who believe the criminal justice system wastes prison space on people with addiction problems. She was convicted in 1992 of receiving stolen property. After she was given probation, a judge revoked it in 1995 for failing a drug test. Sent back to prison, she won parole in 1999 and moved back to Mobile. Authorities revoked her parole in 2001 after she was charged with passing bad checks and escaping from custody. The parole board gave Bettis another shot at freedom in early 2003, but a failed drug test in June of that year sent her back to prison again. The board reinstated Bettis' parole, revoked it again in January 2004 after she failed a drug test and reinstated it late last year. "She is the classic example of overcrowding. She's a nonviolent offender," said Roderick Davis, Bettis' parole officer. "She's being sent to rehab rather than being punished." But if community-based drug treatment proves ineffective, Davis said, prison is the only alternative. "I only have so many options. I have no choice but to lock her up," he said. "I want to see her do good, but the addiction problem she has is strong." Bettis, whose parole was reinstated again in November, said she has struggled since she became addicted to cocaine as a teenager. Her most recent problems stem from stress caused by her husband's fatal bout with cancer, she said. The 39-year-old grandmother said her addiction has been costly. After being paroled again in November, she has found work with a temporary employment agency and hopes to land a job as a chef at the restaurant where she worked before going back to prison. Bettis said she has had no drug cravings since she got out the last time, and she said she's passed all of her drug tests. And now, she has an added incentive to stay clean -- she's pregnant. Bettis said she plans to make up for lost time with her four children and six grandchildren as she plows toward May 6, 2006 -- the date she gets off of parole. "I missed a lot of years of my children's life. I'm mature now, and I have a daughter who's 18 and in the last year of school. And I missed it," she said. "Being in prison gave me a chance to think." Norwood, the Mobile County parole officer, said she has been slower to recommend revocation for rules violations. But, she said, she generally sticks to a two-strike policy. When parole officers are too lenient, she said, public safety suffers. Rules violations send a troubling signal that a parolee is about to commit new crimes. "If he doesn't fear me enough to follow my rules, he's definitely not going to fear the police," she said. Reforming Sentences The Legislature created the Sentencing Commission in 2000 to develop guidelines for sentencing and recommend changes to lawmakers. A few of the commission's recommendations already have gone into effect. The Legislature in 2003, for example, raised the threshold for making theft a felony. Under the previous law, stealing items worth as little as $250 made the crime a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Under the new law, thefts are misdemeanor offenses unless the stolen items are worth at least $500. The threshold for Class B felony theft, punishable by a prison term of two to 20 years, increased from $1,000 to $2,500. Other changes have proven more controversial, however. In April, the commission recommended voluntary sentencing guidelines in an attempt to standardize punishments throughout the state. But the Legislature so far has not adopted the recommendations, which would promote shorter prison sentences for some types of offenses. The commission analyzed sentencing practices for 27 different types of offenses. The proposed guidelines called for dropping the minimum possible sentence ranges for drug crimes by 30 percent and minimum sentences for property crimes by 20 percent. For certain drug felonies, one to 10 years would be tightened to a range of 13 to 65 months. Sentence lengths for crimes such as murder, rape and robbery would remain about the same. The standards would be strictly voluntary. Judges still would be able to impose any prison term within the law but would be asked to fill out paperwork explaining their decisions. Sentencing Commission members took failure during the last legislative session as a blessing in disguise, giving them more time to fine-tune the guidelines and prepare for the upcoming session. The commission put on a dozen workshops for judges throughout the state and also ran pilot programs in three jurisdictions, DeKalb, Montgomery and Jefferson counties, asking judges to sentence defendants as usual and fill out a worksheet to compare the punishments they imposed with the ranges in the proposed guidelines. Flynt, the commission's executive director, said analysts are still studying the results of the pilot programs. "All we had before was anecdotal stories about sentencing practices. Now we've got the data," she said. Getting judges to alter sentencing practices on a voluntary basis may prove prohibitively difficult, warned Allen Tapley, who served 14 years as director of the state Administrative Office of Courts. Tapley recalled working doggedly as director of the court system to maintain a balance between new inmates entering prisons each month and those leaving. He said he regularly sent memos to judges and even telephoned them personally in an attempt to keep the punishments they imposed more or less in line with their colleagues. That and the advent of more alternative sentencing programs designed to keep some offenders out of penitentiaries did work -- for a while. But, he said, keeping that balance is difficult over the long haul. "It takes all cylinders working, all at the same time, to maintain the same pace," he said. "We've used everything known to man to try to solve this problem." The governor's release plan involved creating a special docket of nonviolent cases for the parole board to consider ahead of schedule, beginning at the end of April 2003. In December of that year, he appointed three additional parole board members to reduce a backlog of cases. Although the number of inmates paroled over the last two years has jumped dramatically as a result of Riley's actions, new prisoners have arrived almost as fast. In April 2003, the state's prison population stood at 28,338. Today, it is 27,255, a decrease of 1,083. "You're going to definitely have to have more prisons built. You're not going to solve this problem simply by having more early releases," said Lynda Flynt, executive director of the Sentencing Commission. "When we're at 185 percent capacity, I don't think that's going to be the solution." Prisons are the most expensive component of the criminal justice system, however. The state has not built a new one since 1997. A master plan for the prison system prepared by Carter Goble Associates in March 2003 shows why. The consulting firm estimated the cost of building enough prisons to ensure a bed for every inmate at $933.7 million. For a state prison system so short on funds that it doesn't supply napkins to its inmates, that's an almost unthinkable amount of cash, and Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett noted that it doesn't include the money that would be needed to meet future needs. "The reality is not Dollar One has been budgeted for any new construction," he said. "You want to be tough on crime, and you want to incarcerate people, but you don't want to pay for it." That leaves legislators and other policymakers to grapple with other options. Safety Net One way to cut down on the prison population is to reduce the number who return after serving time behind bars. By national standards, Alabama does relatively little to help ex-cons succeed, according to advocates and government officials. On release day, an Alabama prisoner gets $10, a set of clothes and a bus ticket. "It's pretty stark. If you put yourself in their situation, you can understand how hard that is," said Denis Devane, who helps ex-cons make the transition back to regular life as a volunteer with the Birmingham chapter of Prison Fellowship. "Even going to McDonald's and looking at that menu up there and suddenly having choices, even that can be traumatic for some guys that have been in a long time." As paroles have increased, so has the number of parolees. To try to keep track of them all, the state boosted spending for parole and probation officers. State spending on the office for this fiscal year -- $24.3 million -- is more than 63 percent higher than it was two years ago, making it one of the few agencies in state government to see a significant budget increase. The extra money allowed the department to hire 66 new parole and probation officers over the last two years, bringing the total to more than 277 statewide. Cynthia Dillard, the assistant executive director of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, said that reduced the average number of parolees per officer from almost 200 to around 155. "That's still double what it should be," she said, "but we're in a lot better shape than we were." Parole officers said their experiences have mirrored the statistics. Monica Norwood, a parole officer in the Mobile office, said her caseload shot up to 235 after parolees from the special docket started getting out of prison in 2003. With that many people to supervise, Norwood said, she had to work nights and weekends just to fit in all of the appointments. And, she said, the crunch limited face-to-face contacts to only the most cursory chats. "It was like, 'Hey, how are you doing? Hi. See you next month,'" she said. Norwood said 75 parolees would be an ideal number but added that her current caseload -- around 150 -- is manageable. Carl Wicklund, executive director of the Lexington, Ky.-based American Probation and Parole Association, said caseload matters far less than workload. The important question, he said, is what are parole officers expected to do? An officer with low-risk parolees who have had stable jobs can supervise many more people than an officer with high-risk offenders. In general, though, Wicklund said, parole becomes less effective with higher caseloads. "If you have a doctor with 150 cancer patients to see in a month or even a week, how good a job is he going to do? ... A hundred and fifty, if you assume these are people just coming out of prison and need a lot of support, that's huge," he said. "It's going to become much more of an administrative function. ... (Parole officers) should ideally be agents of change." Tapley, the former court system administrator, said he believes the Board of Pardons and Paroles remains understaffed and underfunded even after the recent increases. That's shortsighted, he said, because there is no cheaper way to deal with criminals. "That's the most important thing we haven't done," he said. "It works historically. It works in every state. And it's common sense." The early results of the special program show that fewer of the inmates cut loose under it have committed new crimes than ex-cons as a whole. Despite those encouraging statistics, Board of Pardons and Paroles Director William Segrest decried major gaps in community-based, substance-abuse treatment and mental-health programs. "Those programs are absolutely critical," he said. "They're not there now, not in nearly sufficient numbers." Devane, who serves on the board of directors at Shepherds Fold, a group of five halfway houses in the Birmingham area, agreed. "I don't think there are enough of them, and I think there is a need for halfway houses that can take guys for a longer period of time," he said. "Four months, for a lot of people, isn't quite enough." Devane said the first few months out of prison are key. When ex-cons fail, it's usually during that period. He said counselors at the Shepherds Fold halfway houses concentrate on helping participants beat lingering substance-abuse addictions, find jobs and reconnect with the community. He said they also try to get them comfortable with living without the strict, regimented structure of prison. "The financial pressures can be pretty significant, especially if an inmate doesn't have a family," Devane said. "Prison becomes home. And when you're leaving home, it gets pretty rough." - --- MAP posted-by: Beth