Citizens
House Appropriations Subcommittee on Corrections April 15, 2008 Testimony of Citizens Alliance on Prisons & Public Spending
Good morning, Madam Chairperson and members of the committee. I am Barbara Levine, executive director of the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending, more easily called CAPPS, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you for a few minutes. Since its inception eight years ago, CAPPS has had a consistent dual mission: to reduce excessive spending on incarceration and to shift resources to services that prevents crime and rehabilitate offenders. Given these goals, we are very heartened by two current trends. First, we are heartened by the increased focus on crime prevention and rehabilitation. Renewed support seems to be coming from virtually every quarter for substance abuse treatment, diverting the mentally ill from jails and prisons, supportive programs for vulnerable children, keeping low-risk offenders in the community and giving former prisoners a second chance. Doubtless the department’s focus on MPRI (Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative) has encouraged many people to think even more broadly about strengthening community resources as a way to avoid incarceration. This is all to the good. Certainly everyone supports the goal of crime prevention. But there are a few caveats we need to consider. Prevention, by whatever means, is a long-term strategy. We cannot wait until crime has been reduced to start reducing the size of the prison population. For one thing, the money for prevention programs has to come from somewhere. For another, we need to get a grip on corrections spending now. Even without the additional cost of new prevention efforts, the cost of corrections will continue to rise. The number of prisoners must decline significantly or economic adjustments and inflationary pressures will keep the MDOC budget at 20 percent or more of all General Fund spending. And finally, the notion that crime reduction is the sole solution to prison spending rests on two false premises: that crime rates are the sole impetus for prison growth and that everyone who is currently in prison needs to be there for public safety. Mr. Schrantz and Mr. DeBor addressed the connection between crime and incarceration last week. I’d like to elaborate a bit. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that there is no connection. If we had no crime, we would need no prisons. If we locked up all males between the ages of 12 and 32, we would certainly have a lot less crime. The huge increase in the nation’s incarceration rate has undoubtedly made some contribution to the decline in crime rates throughout the 1990s. The issue is: how large is that contribution? That is, how much is crime affected by incarceration rates and how much is it determined by factors like the state of the economy and the number of citizens in their crime prone years? The academic literature indicates that increased imprisonment accounts for no more than 25 percent of the decline in crime. Conversely, how much is incarceration driven by crime rates and how much is it driven by criminal justice policy choices? The lack of a strong direct causal relationship between crime rates and incarceration rates is demonstrated in the handout attached to my testimony called The Michigan Prison System in Context: a Nine-State Comparison. I won’t go through all the details now. They are highlighted on the back of the chart. But you will see that despite having the highest incarceration rate, Michigan still has the highest violent crime rate, suggesting that prison is not the cure for crime. You will also see that states with incarceration rates very similar to each other have very different crime rates. Clearly, imprisonment and crime, while not unrelated, are each strongly determined by other factors. That brings me to the second heartening trend – the MDOC’s focus on length of stay and the policies that drive it. Certainly this trend will be strengthened by the independent analysis to be done by the Council on State Governments. But I would like to spend the last few minutes of my remarks trying to help nudge things along. As the department has explained, the incarceration rate is a function of how many people we send to prison and how long we keep them. These numbers result, in turn, from various policy choices. And because our population is so large, the impact of even small policy changes can be very dramatic. For instance, a change that resulted in 10,000 prisoners serving just three fewer months would equate to 2,500 beds. The department has stressed the effect of sentencing policies, particularly those that would keep more people from coming to prison at all. That could include changing some low level felonies to misdemeanors or changing the sentencing guidelines grids to move more people from straddle cells to lockout cells. I would like to focus on several other choices that affect length of stay. The second attachment to my testimony is called: Six Strategies for Right-Sizing Michigan’s Prison Population. Sentencing reform is the second point on the list. While CAPPS supports the concept of incarcerating fewer low level offenders, we don’t think that alone will reduce the population enough. Michigan has already done a relatively good job of keeping less serious offenders out of prison or giving them fairly short sentences. Our prisons are increasingly filled with assaultive and sex offenders whose length of stay just keeps getting longer. We need to look realistically at that population if we are to make significant gains. Certainly more serious offenses deserve more serious punishment. But all the research shows that sheer length of stay, standing alone, has no relationship to recidivism. In most cases, public safety is not improved by keeping someone for 30 years instead of 15. In most countries, and many American states, 15 or 20 years is considered a very long time to spend in prison. But we routinely impose minimum sentences of 20, 30, 40 years, if not life. That is not a new phenomenon in Michigan. But when people used to get generous amounts of good time, a 40 year sentence could actually be served in 16 years. Now, with the elimination of good time in any form, 40 years means 40 years. We need to re-examine sentencing guidelines at the high end and reconsider at what point our desire to be punitive is counterproductive. As the department has acknowledged, the judge’s sentence is not the only thing that determines length of stay. Whether and when people are paroled has come to be increasingly critical. It is quite common for people with minimum sentences of only a year or two to serve double or triple their minimum because of repeated parole denials. I don’t yet have the current figure, but last year about 30 percent of the prison population – 16,000 people – was eligible for parole. Here, too, the issue is largely how punitive we choose to be, not how much safer we are. CAPPS’s number one strategy would involve simply enforcing the parole board’s own statutorily mandated guidelines. People who score high probability for release on those guidelines do so because they are at very low risk for re-offending. In 1996, the board paroled 81 percent of the people in the high probability category. In 2006, the rate was just 53 percent. In addition, the cutoff point for determining who falls into the high probability range was also changed, reducing the pool of high probability cases. When asked about these figures, the response from the board is typically that many of the people being denied are assaultive and sex offenders, as if the type of offense makes the reason for denial self-evident. However, the offense was already taken into account by the sentencing judge and in these cases the board’s own guidelines demonstrate very little risk to the public. So this answer is satisfactory only if we want the parole board to increase length of stay in order to further increase the punishment. On the other hand, we could choose to implement the judge’s minimum sentence for people who are statistically at low risk for reoffending unless, as the statute says, there is some substantial and compelling reason not to. That could save more than 4.600 beds and $120 million. The same issue of what we gain by increasing the length of stay for people who present virtually no risk of reoffending is presented even more starkly by the parolable lifers. Nearly 1,000 of them who were sentenced before Oct. 1992, became eligible for parole after serving 10 calendar years. While they used to be routinely released in 15-18 years, the current board has habitually passed over nearly all of them. Many have now served 25 or 30 years. Of course the offenses involved were very serious. But a federal court has found that the board’s changed treatment of these parolable lifers violates the ex post facto clause of the U. S. Constitution and has ordered that they all be reconsidered. The board is presently complying with that order by conducting interviews with these lifers, but it is also appealing the court’s decision. These are aging, low-risk prisoners, most of whom have excellent institutional records. Many were first offenders and/or quite young when they committed their crimes decades ago. If, instead of appealing, the board paroled 600 of these men and women, we could save nearly $20 million a year. To fully appreciate current parole policies, it is helpful to look at individual cases. I have attached to my testimony five case histories of people who have been denied parole – two lifers and three people who are well past their minimum terms. They all involve second-degree murder or criminal sexual conduct. All the people have excellent institutional records. Some have similarly situated co-defendants who have been released. Some will sound familiar because I have told you about them before, but they’re still locked up. Aldo Gallina is 2.5 years past his earliest release date; Curtis Davis is 5 years past his; and Gabriel Christ is 7.5 years past his, though he would be immediately deported to Germany. Robert Weisenauer, who has been parole-eligible for 18 years, has the support of his sentencing judge. Ross Hayes, who has been eligible for 24 years, has the support of his victim’s relatives. I urge you to look at these examples and consider whether these parole decisions seem reasonable, cost-effective and fair. Finally, one of the clearest examples of how policy choices drive length of stay is the adoption, in 1998, of “truth-in-sentencing.” By that time, Michigan had already eliminated generous, progressive good time credits that were still common in most other states. We had replaced them with more modest amounts of disciplinary credits that met the standard for receiving federal prison-building funds. Nonetheless, in the name of truth in sentencing, we adopted a scheme that did two things. It prohibited the award of any time off for good behavior, thereby eliminating disciplinary credits. And it required that the entire minimum sentence be served in a secure facility, wiping out what had been a highly successful community residential program that permitted prisoners approaching their first parole dates to live in the community in halfway houses. These prisoners were in MDOC custody, under the supervision of MDOC staff, but they could obtain jobs or go to school and recon-nect with their families. At the program’s peak, in 1992, there were 3,500 people in community residential placements, meaning they were not in expensive prison beds. Our total elimination of disciplinary credits puts us out of sync with virtually the entire country. It also puts our state prisons out of sync with our county jails. As Rep. Rick Jones will tell you, the counties depend on the award of sheriff’s good time both to manage behavior and to control the size of county jail populations. Disciplinary credits don’t require that the parole board release anyone. They just make people who behave well enough to earn them eligible for parole consideration sooner. There is no reason to believe that reducing the average Michigan sentence of 7.7 years to 6.4 years would have any impact on crime rates. But if we restored disciplinary credits and released 3,000 people who earned all of theirs, we would save approximately $100 million. This is without doubt the simplest, most straightforward policy change we could make to safely reduce the prisoner population. If, in addition, we restored the community residential program, we could add to it the sort of community-based services that have now been organized through MPRI. People would still live in MDOC-run halfway houses and, if warranted, could be returned to prison in a heartbeat without even having to go through the parole revocation process. That would give us the best of both worlds – implementing a structured, evidence-based re-entry process while saving millions of dollars by moving up the implementation date to six months or a year before actual parole. Sentence length, parole release, disciplinary credits, community placements – these policy choices all depend on how much risk, real and perceived, we are willing to assume, and how punitive we want to be. The process being undertaken with the Council of State Governments should allow us to determine what we are actually gaining from having an average length of stay that is 70 percent higher than the national average. If we are willing to keep all options on the table, including a return to the more moderate policies of just 10 or 15 years ago, we could free up hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in the other services Michigan taxpayers badly need. Thank you.
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