Patricia Krenwinkel Speaks Up

A few years ago we reported on Patricia Krenwinkel’s parole denial. Today’s New York Times includes an emotional opinion piece by Krenwinkel, looking back on her life and speaking about the Manson family, her crimes, the years in prison, and her self identity.

Will Krenwinkel ever receive parole? I doubt it. Even with our recasting of old and infirm inmates from risky to expensive, the Manson Family murders have a strong symbolic hold over our culture and imagination, and our revulsion of violent crime expresses itself in our fears and vindictiveness. As some readers may recall, another Family member, Susan Atkins, died in prison and was denied parole despite advanced cancer and disability.

But what I find notable here is something that sometimes gets forgotten in anti-prison advocacy: the importance of a message of responsibility. This is what makes me a radical realist. I truly believe that violent crime is real. I don’t think it’s common, nor do I think it justifies the mass incarceration machine and the human rights violations behind bars. But to victims, actual and potential, homicide, assault, and sexual abuse are frightening and damaging and debilitating. And no matter what environmental considerations we take into account, we must not discount the importance of taking personal responsibility. Not as part of a retributivist approach, but as part of a social prevention strategy.

When people who committed violent crime take personal responsibility for their crime, they teach us that redeeming the soul from shame and guilt is possible. They teach us that the victim is no “other” and that our shared humanity means we can have empathy for one another. It means that women are not hoes, cops are not pigs, rival gang members are not animals, people at work one begrudges are not monsters, old people are not dispensable, people of different ethnicities and family structures are not despicable. They teach us that life goes on behind bars, and that even though conditions may be atrocious and require a struggle, there may also be an internal struggle to mature and understand and know yourself better. And perhaps, if victims and potential victims are people, then the inmates serving time for violent crimes are not monsters, either–they are people, like you and me, who did terrible things, and while we expect them to pay a price, and to protect society from the danger they pose, we also should treat them as human beings.

State Budget 2014-2015

Just in the nick of time, the CA Legislature has approved the 2014-2014 state budget.

The passed budget contains a few highlights pertinent to the criminal justice system, which can be found in the trailer bill, AB 1468:

  • Persons with felony drug offenses will now be eligible for CalFRESH & CalWORKS; 
  • The budget allocates $2 million for licenses/I.Ds for parolees; and,
  • There will be a presumption of split sentencing for realigned offenders. 

The final budget bill, SB 852, can be seen here.

The New Correctional Discourse of Scarcity: Executive Summary

This morning I gave a talk about my upcoming book at the Western Society of Criminology Annual Meeting. Here is the gist of my comments.

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The New York Times proclaims the end of mass incarceration; prison population in the US is declining for the first time in 37 years; Milton Friedman and Pat Robertson are advocating for marijuana reform; several states abolish the death penalty and others are closing prisons, importing and exporting inmates, and reducing their usage of solitary confinement.
What is going on? Is mass incarceration, indeed, coming to an end? Have we come to care more about the human rights of suspects, defendants, and inmates? Have we rejected the war on drugs?
This talk, based on my book in progress with UC Press, argues that these changes are the function of a new discourse of corrections, fueled by the financial crisis. As I argue in the book, the severe crisis, affecting especially local governments, generates new ways of conceptualizing criminal justice problems, new alliances between conservatives and progressives, new policies and practices of incarceration, and new ways of imagining the offender.
Many wonderful books have come out recently that tell the story of mass incarceration, offering political and cultural explanations both on the micro and macro levels. In adding my own narrative of what happened before, and especially AFTER the 2007 crisis, I do not wish to supplant political and cultural analyses with historical materialism. Rather, I argue that the expenditures on criminal justice tell a story of policymaking sincerity and of the limits of criminal justice project as a sound fiscal investment. That is, that a historical-materialist approach complements our understandings of politics and culture. To understand the extent of this, we need to go back in time to the first federally-initiated grand project of crime control.
Prohibition, initially the successful product of an effective narrow coalition, was repealed largely because of its economic consequences: a combination of poorly-funded law enforcement and the senselessness of giving up on considerable tax revenue in a lean economic period.  This poor experience impacted the federal laissez-faire approach to criminal justice in the postwar years. This trend began to be reversed by the Warren Court’s clamoring for federalization of rights. Ironically, the Nixon election, often described as capitalizing on high crime rates and protesting the Warren Court’s project of incorporation, put in place an administration that was equally eager to federalize criminal justice, but with a very different agenda in mind. The 1968 Omnibus Act’s primary effect was fueling federal money into law enforcement, with the aim to make police officers more effective in the streets. At that point, money had not yet been fueled into prison construction upfront; arguably, money was never fueled, wholesale, into prison construction at the federal level. Rather, this front-end federal investment led to an increased number of arrests, requiring room to house inmates. The trend of punitivizing local law by fueling federal money persists to this day.
The big project of managing the product of these policing tactics – prison building– was left to be financed at the local level, and mostly through bonds. The bond mechanism does to prison construction what the Nixon funding structure did to prison existence: It pushes it out of sight. Rather than an open tax requiring voter information and approval, the specific types of bonds used for prison construction act as a hidden tax, or rather, a tax on future generations. The hidden aspect of prison finance is particularly true with regard to private prison construction and operation.
And then, the financial crisis happened. While its epicenter was the banking industry, it has had profound impact on the fiscal health of local governments. Since the late seventies, most local governments have come to rely on a tax base that is increasingly income- and sales-based, rather than property-based. The former, compared to the latter, is much more sensitive to fluctuations in the market. Shaking the tax base, and dealing in various localities with the inability to pay for pensions, meant that local budgets became depleted.
To bring things back into the correctional realm, it’s important to remember that corrections constitute at least 7% of all expenditures in state budgets, exceeding, in some states, the expenditures on higher education. States and local governments—that is, the locations where the vast majority of law enforcement, criminal justice and corrections occur—have therefore had to face a reality so far hidden from the eye by the bond mechanism and the illusion of a war on crime: The need to do with less.
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This need to save on corrections has yielded a discourse that I refer to as Humonetarianism: A scaling-back of the punitive project on account of its fiscal consequences. In the book, I identify four main features of Humonetarianism: New Discourse, New Allies, New Practices, and New Perceptions of Offenders. I want to shortly discuss each in turn.
The new discourse of correctional scarcity tends to be shallow and to focus on short term. Cost had always been part of the criminal conversation, but it had never been a centerpiece of policymaking and advocacy. A good example of this discourse is the new rhetoric of death penalty, whose successes and gains are significant. Since the financial crisis, five states – New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Illinois, and Connecticut – have abolished the death penalty. Many more states have placed moratoria upon its use and executions slowed down considerably. In California, Prop 34, which failed to pass in the 2012, nevertheless closed the gap between supporters and opponents of the death penalty to a mere 6%. An analysis of these campaigns shows the extent to which abolition advocates moved away from arguments on human rights and deterrence, put racial discrimination arguments on the back burner, and focused their campaigns on costs. Similarly, conversations about legalization of drugs have emphasized the waste involved in pursuing low level nonviolent offenders, and the successful propositions in Washington and Colorado have relied on the persuasive power of drugs as a source of revenue, much like their predecessors, the prohibition repeal advocates.
The conversation about drug legalization and de-prioritizing drug law enforcement reveals the second aspect of this discourse: Its ability to generate new allies. The 2012 presidential election, and, to a lesser extent, the 2008 presidential election, were notable for the complete lack of any criminal justice discourse, and especially the absence of drugs. The Obama administration, despite its controversial commitment to bipartisanism, did not fear alienating centrists and moderates by explicitly making marijuana enforcement a low priority. Leading conservative voices are calling for an end to the war on drugs, citing fiscal responsibility and the possibility of revenue as a powerful incentive. Among such names we count Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, free market economist Milton Friedman, and religious figures such as Pat Robertson.
The impact of humonetarianism has gone beyond rhetoric and legislation, and has generated the third feature of this discourse: Innovative practices in the field. California’s criminal justice realignment, consisting of a refunneling of low-level offenders out of state prison and into county jails—was initiated as a budgetary savings mechanism, correcting decades of economic disincentives and ending what Frank Zimring referred to as the “correctional free lunch.” Many states are closing or repurposing their prisons, which yields a less savory aspect of humonetarianism: Deals with other states to house their surplus prison population and thus make a profit on closed institution. But many states, like California and Hawaii, are now questioning the economic value of shipping their inmates out of state, and coming up with structures to keep them at home. Even institutions that cannot be repurposed, such as supermax prisons, seem to be saving considerable amounts of money through reduction projects. Moreover, the financial crisis creates an increased reliance on community corrections. Expenditures on programs have been cut; the shallowness of the conversation in some localities does not allow for a long-term assessments of the savings promised by recidivism reduction. But there is an increasing reliance on GPS monitoring.
Fourth and finally, humonetarianism has made salient some features and traits of the offender population. For decades, a policy of selective incapacitation has made us examine inmates through the lens of their level of risk; the financial crisis has come to make us see them in terms of cost. The recent modest success in scaling back Three Strikes in California was based on the increased salience of long-term Three Strikers as old and infirm inmates, whose lengthy incarceration drives up the costs of health care, already contested in California. And in many states, the introduction of geriatric parole and medical parole are a somber indication of how little Americans expect of their government: Not broad national healthcare for themselves, but less state-financed free healthcare for their inmates.
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There are limits to the power of humonetarianism to transform the criminal justice apparatus. The for-profit aspect of our incarceration project arguably leads to particularly ferocious activities by private prison providers, who in this market of dearth try to offer an alternative to decreasing incarceration. This is not only an exploitation of the punitive state for profit, but sometimes generating more punitiveness by lobbying for punitive laws, as well as seeking new and emerging populations of potential inmates, such as undocumented immigrants.
It is also business as usual in many plantation-like institutions that have always relied on a “tough-‘n’-cheap” financial logic. The rhetoric of self sufficiency has a strong hold on many prisons and jails in the rural south, and it has not abated, but rather been strengthened, in the current crisis.
The dearth of rehabilitation programs, and their declining number in these lean years, is another reminder of a limitation of this discourse: It is mostly focused on emergency, short-term savings. Because humonetarianism is not accompanied, in any serious way, by a true change in perception of human rights, the idea of thinking about reentry and recidivism reduction as a long-term cost-saving mechanism has not been as successful as it could, perhaps, be. Recidivism studies are, by nature, difficult to do, and moreover, they take time, which cannot be translated to proven political gains in a short election cycle. The theoretical possibility to frame these as a deeper form of savings has not, so far, yielded much success in the correctional arena.
There are also big questions about the extent to which humonetarian arguments have any traction with regard to particularly violent or reviled offenders. Sex offender policies come to mind immediately. The last California elections showed that old-school punitivism, masquerading as victim rights discourse, is still a powerful incentive to voters in creating more post-incarceration sanctions on sex offenders.  The strong rhetorical pull of decades can, apparently, withstand any argument about financial waste, as it has withstood the evidence of low recidivism rates.
Given these challenges, can humonetarianism be successful and enduring, and for how long? Its main advantage is the broad appeal of the financial argument. A possible counterargument is that, by focusing on costs, we arguably pay an intangible price of cheapening public discourse and taking human rights arguments off the table. I am less concerned about this issue. Americans have always expressed their values and measured their priorities by their willingness to pay taxes. A vote of confidence in lowering the price tag on corrections is also an expression of preferences for road construction, education, health care, and other services, and a statement that the mass incarceration project has lost its appeal as a national priority.
What remains to be seen is whether cost-centered reforms will stand when the economy improves. And in that department, while it would be unwise to offer accurate predictions, my crystal ball offers this: Some things might come back, some things might not come back, and some things might come back in different forms. For example, I expect that, once a critical mass of states abolishes the death penalty on fiscal grounds, it will not come back. I expect that a recriminalization of marijuana, once it is perceived as any other product in the market, is not feasible. Will we find other wars and panics? Probably, and those will have to be addressed through other-than-cost arguments if they occur at a time of economic plenty.
While the lasting power of cost-driven changes in policy remains to be seen, a sincere and thoughtful appeal to the public’s sense of fiscal responsibility, accompanied by an effort to reframe the cost conversation as a long-term concern, are one of the major steps we must take to end mass incarceration, so that we do not, to quote Rahm Emmanuel, let a serious crisis go to waste.

Less Prison, Less Crime: SF Does Things Right

This evening I attended a town hall event with Senator Mark Leno and other guests. The event focused on criminal justice reform in California, but most of the time was spent discussing San Francisco’s policies and practices. It was, for the most part, a happy occasion, with plenty of opportunity to celebrate San Francisco’s sensible approach to law enforcement and corrections.

Senator Leno opened by giving some historical background. Ten years ago, when he started chairing the Public Safety Committee on the Assembly, California was spending 5.3% of its budget on corrections. That rose to 11% pre-realignment. But we’ve turned a corner. In 2014, this figure will be lowered to 7%. And, despite not incarcerating as many people (actually, being the county that incarcerates the least amount of people!), San Francisco is experiencing record low rates of violent crime. How are we doing this without recurring to mass incarceration?

There are a few things that are in the works. The unsuccessful attempt to reclassify simple possession, a misdemeanor, as an infraction, might be resuscitated. We’re beginning to make use of medical parole (trying to save $150 million dollars spent on health costs and security costs involving treatment of inmates who can’t take care of their basic needs, some of whom are actually comatose.)

The main achievement has been the enactment of SB 678, the counterpart to AB 109, which creates community corrections. Shifting the responsibility for the post-sentence phase to the counties was accompanied by a shift in approach. Wendy Still, the Chief Probational Officer, spoke of her 26 years of experience in corrections and of moving to the counties to make a difference before people come to state prison. New admissions to prison are now down 37% statewide, and 47% in San Francisco, which always held the lowest prison rates and has reduced them now even further. The probationers, now addressed as clients, are no longer perceived to require surveillance and supervision, but rather services to help them get their lives on track. The system of incentives has been modified so that reduction in recidivism makes a difference. The money that counties received upfront to set up SB 678 – $45 million in federal stimulus grants – yielded &180 in correctional savings.

David Onek from UC Berkeley’s center on criminal justice mentioned the unique nature of San Francisco’s criminal justice apparatus and the remarkable collaboration between its different agencies. While it is, he said, too early for a realignment report card, it seems that San Francisco was well ahead of the curve for a long time.

Jeff Adachi talked about the work that still needed doing: Fixing the racial disparity in San Francisco’s correctional institutions and seriously improving our reentry services. One measure taken toward the latter is Clean Slate, which helps folks with convictions start anew and put their lives on track.

Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said that San Francisco jails are remarkable in that they are undercrowded. He also spoke of his wish to be the first sheriff to request less beds, or to rebuild dilapidated institutions with less beds than they had in the first place.

Commander John Murphy of the SFPD talked about the collaboration between the city’s different agencies, and of the effective reduction in violent crime (16% less shootings.) The focus is on Anthony Braga‘s hot spots – apparently, 50% of all violent crime in the city happens in 2% of its geographical area, which allows the police to focus their efforts in this area, involve community organizations, and shift the attention away from low-level drug offending (arrests for drug offenses have gone down from 50-100 a day to less than 10.)

It was a self-congratulatory evening, but rightly so; San Francisco has much to take pride in. And, as a side note, it was rather delightful to see a large contingent of the awesome United Playaz in the audience. So glad to see young people politically involved.

Charles Manson’s Parole Hearing This Wednesday

Charles Manson, 2012.
Image courtesy L.A. Times, released at CNN request.

Notorious murderer Charles Manson comes up for parole this Wednesday. The L.A. Times reports:

Manson refused to participate in his last parole hearing, in 2007, describing himself as a “prisoner of the political system.” He also declined to participate in any psychological evaluations that were part of that process.


He and other members of his so-called family were convicted of killing actress Sharon Tate and six other people during a bloody rampage in the Los Angeles area during two August nights in 1969. He is housed in a special unit for inmates felt to be endangered by other inmates separated from the general prison population.


Twice in the last few years, guards at Corcoran State Prison said they found phones in the notorious killer’s possession. Manson called people in California, New Jersey and Florida with an LG flip phone found under his prison bunk in March 2009, The Times reported in 2011. A second cellphone was found a year later. Thirty days were added to his sentence for the first offense, officials said.


Earlier, a homemade weapon was found in his possession.
Despite the prospect that Manson will be absent, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said it would vigorously oppose Manson’s release. “We consistently [opposed parole] and will continue to do so,” spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said.

The female members of Manson’s “family” have also been consistently denied parole, despite not presenting danger to the community even in the parole board’s view. We previously reported on the parole denial of Patricia Krenwinkel, who was repentant and is regarded a model prisoner, and of Susan Atkins, who died in prison following a long period of illness. There seems to be little doubt that Manson’s parole will also be denied.

Realignment: Potential and Pitfalls

Photo courtesy Jamie Soja for SF Weekly.

Today’s SF Weekly features a detailed story by Lauren Smiley about rehabilitative initiatives for realignment inmates in San Francisco jails, complete with data, anecdotes, and an interview with yours truly. To whet your appetite about the story:

Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a three-judge ruling that California must reduce its overcrowded prisons to 137.5 percent of capacity by mid-2013, down from a peak of 202 percent capacity in 2006. That meant siphoning out about 34,000 prisoners, enough inmates to nearly fill the Oakland A’s stadium.


The state came up with a plan: Nobody gets out of prison early, but less-serious offenders would be sentenced to county jail, and the supervision of certain criminals released from prison would be moved from state parole agents to county probation officers. That means that if these ex-cons violate the terms of their release, they will be booked into county jail, not prison.


Voilà: Prisoner numbers are down for the state. The prisons are currently on track to meet the deadline, at 164 percent capacity and descending.


So San Francisco will now attempt what the state corrections system failed at: rehabbing Nate Bracy. It will try to override 17 years of criminal behavior and to get him — and the 700 others who will arrive in San Francisco over the next two years — to live like your average Joe Citizen.

Realignment: An Opportunity to Rethink Corrections

Some of the recent developments in realignment implementation, such as the request for jail expansion in Los Angeles County and Riverside’s shocking vote to charge inmates $140 per night for their jail stay, make one ponder whether counties really understand the idea behind realignment legislation.

AB 109 is not merely a jurisdictional change. The legislator intended an actual ideological shift in how California treats its inmates. A simple read of the bill’s text provides ample proof of that. The bill explicitly states that there would be a preference for intergration in the community, through programs like home detention. More importantly, it shifts inmates from state parole supervision to community postrelease, meant to provide better integration in the community. And to achieve that, community corrections partnerships have been formed in the counties and tasked with planning release in the context of a given community. Yes, the impetus for the realignment was fiscal, but there is ample evidence that this is intended to be a true paradigm shift. This story from Western Cities makes a great read in that respect.

If so, old-school thinking about construction and warehousing needs to be set aside and new models need to be considered. For example, why not reconsider felon disenfranchisement and extend voting rights to jailed inmates? As this ACLU guide explains, felons on parole currently cannot vote, but what about folks on community postrelease? Not only does it appear that these folks are not “on parole”, but rather under a probation-like regime, and can therefore vote, but it’s also sound public policy: There’s robust statistical proof that extending voting rights to people, and getting them involved in civic life, significantly contributes to recidivism reduction. Many countries in the world think nothing of providing inmates with voting rights as they do their time, not only upon release. Reintegration into society and reducing reoffending: Isn’t that what this is all about?

Here’s another example: As we discovered on our Food Deserts conference earlier this Fall, there are some beautiful prison projects that include community gardens and the like. The produce cannot, for various reasons, be consumed by CDCR inmates themselves. But why should local jail inmates not enjoy the fruits of their labor? And if, for some reason, that doesn’t make sense, why not combine their jail sentence with some landscaping work in urban gardens so that low-income families can get more fresh produce?

A third possible opportunity, borrowed from a suggestion Jonathan Simon made at a public talk in 2009, and which would become much more pertinent now: Given the concerns about infrastructure disasters and earthquakes in California, why not use jails and community postrelease programs to teach more inmates and released folks to save lives, homes, and businesses? It is an important function that we would all benefit from.

I truly hope that some counties will be able to think outside the box, set aside their appetite for construction and warehousing, and seize the realignment for what the legislators intended it to be: An opportunity to reverse the California correctional crisis.

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman‘s new and fantastic book Thinking, Fast and Slow is a fascinating journey into an intellectual career spanning more than forty years. Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize for his work on rationality with Amos Tversky, presents a lifetime of research and findings into human rationality and its fallacies in a coherent, intriguing and convincing way. It is a book I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone regardless of the context of criminal justice. Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas on rationality, however, have special bearing on issues of criminal justice policy, and the book might therefore be particularly interesting to this blog’s readership.

To fully understand the novelty Kahneman’s (and Tversky’s) Nobel-winning ideas, it is important to keep in mind that they were generated against the backdrop of very traditional ideas of human rationality in economics. Classic economic theory assumes a human subject who is fully rational, fully knowledgeable, and operates within a framework of cost-benefit analysis. Kahneman and Tversky, students of human behavior rather than of economics, devoted their careers to questioning and refining this model of human cognition to accommodate flaws and fallacies in rationality, revolutionizing the field of economics and enriching it with empirical insights about the actual and irrational workings of human behavior patterns. Which is how a psychologist ended up receiving a Nobel prize for economics.

Kahneman introduces his ideas to the public through a fresh perspective that serves as the leitmotif of the book. Our thinking, he argues, is characterized by two modes, or systems, if you will. System 1 is responsible for the quick-and-dirty judgments and conjectures that allow us to instantaneously make sense of the world. When more effort is needed, System 2 snaps into action, and engages in the complex thinking required to solve problems or think outside our cognitive box. The problem is that System 2 is lazy. It does not come into play unless it absolutely must, and it takes an effort to engage. So, our default mode is to slack and allow System 1 to do our work for us. The result is that we generate our opinions about the world in ways that rely on shortcuts, assumptions, stereotypes, overly causal interpretation, and anchors, that are flawed and lead us to making a myriad of mistakes.

Kahneman proceeds by mapping for us, chapter by chapter, a series of these fallacies. Among the heuristics and biases he mentions are the halo effect (forming an opinion of something based on one or two qualities and extrapolating), What-You-See-Is-All-There-Is (WYSIATI – relying on whatever information is available, no matter how flimsy and unreliable), anchoring (linking our assessments to whatever number is thrown out, no matter how improbable), substituting difficult questions for easy ones, ignoring base lines, ignoring regression to the mean, and creating overly causal narratives for things that could be accounted for through pure chance. He then walks us through the impact these fallacies have on professional decision making, and finally through his more recent work on happiness.

The book is fascinating for anyone who is interested in understanding human behavior, but I found its implications for criminal justice policy particularly startling. The insights on flawed rationality can explain not only public punitivism and voter initiatives, but also the flawed behavior of professionals: judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. Here are some of the many examples of possible applications.

A recent Supreme Court decision grappled with the question how to prevent injustices stemming from the prosecution’s failure to comply with the Brady requirement to disclose to the defense “any exculpatory evidence”. The assumption made by the Court is that monetary compensations to exonerees who were wrongfully accused without an opportunity to receive evidence in their favor are only effective when prosecutors acted out of malice. In a paper I presented at a Constitutional Law conference in Chicago, following Kahneman, Tversky, and a solid body of behavioral research, I suggest that many Brady violations may not be attributable to anyone’s fault, but rather to confirmation bias: Prosecutors and defense attorneys simply read evidence differently, and prosecutors, given their professional environment and their pro-government bias and socialization, are less likely to view evidence with an eye toward its exonerative potential. I’m in the process of devising a study to examine the existence and extent of confirmation bias in prosecutorial and defense perception of evidence, as well as its causes.

Another big area where heuristics and biases are important is sentencing. Kahneman’s book is full of examples of flawed decision making due to chance issues. Notably, he cites a series of studies comparing judicial decision making to those of computer algorithms, finding that the computer makes less mistakes. But he also shows how judges making parole decisions tended to be more generous in terms of release immediately after eating, when their ability to access System 2, and their cognitive ease, were at their prime. This is, of course, greatly disturbing, and a factor to keep in mind when thinking of the strong judicial opposition to sentencing guidelines and any form of diminished discretion. Contrary to the bon ton in today’s analysis of the correctional crisis, it may well be that sentencing guidelines and the diminishing discretion of judges were not a fatal decision reached by overzealous punitive right-wingers and misguided left-wingers, but rather a good decision, whose adverse effects are not due to the decrease in judicial discretion, but due to the increase in prosecutorial discretion.

Another important implication of al this risk prediction and algorithms. Kahneman’s experiments strongly support favoring the quantitative tools used by various correctional systems, including CDCR, over the sort of clinical risk assessments popular in the early 20th century. The concern we have with giving machines the power to assess individuals’ risk based on stereotypes may be exaggerated, Kahneman’s work suggests. Humans may make more serious mistakes, and reliance on past predictors of recidivism or parole violations are more reliable than intuitive impressions of trust and sympathy.

An area I find particularly compelling is the study of public punitivism, and prospect theory could have a field day with what we know of this. A decent argument can be made that much of what passes for public decision making in the field of voter initiatives is System 1 work. First, the public’s reliance on “redball crimes” – shocking instances of horrifying, sensationalized crimes, that receive a lot of media attention – is a prime example of WYSIATI. Rather than engaging with statistics that expose the entire picture of crime reality, we rely on what is salient and reported, rather than with what we know to be truer. Moreover, much of the punitive legislation against sex offenders might be an example of substituting difficult questions with easy ones. Rather than thinking what sort of punishment sex offenders deserve, or how many resources to invest in punishing them, or which measures would reduce recidivism, voters may be thinking on how much they dislike sex offenders. A System 1 mechanism of “translating scales” converts the extent of dislike and revulsion to a measure of punishment, and punitive voter initiatives are born and passed as law.

There could be many more examples of possible applications, and I’m happy to entertain some of these in the comments. i just want to add a  final note on the delights of Kahneman’s book: What distinguishes this book from other popular behavioral science books, such as Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, or Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, is not only its quality–Kahneman respects his readers, does not oversimplify, and happily shares the depth of his intellectual process, which places this book in a class of its own–but the moving, nostalgic tribute it makes to the working partnership and decades-long friendship between him and Tversky. As many friends who have collaborated on research projects know, the relationship between collaborators is unique and special; the curiosity and give-and-take of the work creates a strong bond. The book is a love letter to Tversky and to the two researchers’ community of students and colleagues. One can almost walk side by side with Tversky and Kahneman, listening in on their conversations and debates, witnessing the generation of ideas sparked by their easy, friendly conversations, and feeling the parental warmth of their respect and enthusiasm for the success of their intellectual children and grandchildren: professors, postdocs, and graduate students. It is a pleasure to enjoy this additional dimension on the book, made more poignant by the heartbreak over Tversky’s untimely death at 59 in 1996, six years before the Nobel prize win. And it is a reminder of how important it is to appreciate one’s scientific community, or scientific family, and its contributions to one’s intellectual and emotional life.

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Many thanks to Haim Aviram for our discussions about this post and to Robert Rubin for the recommendation.

Realignment Funds: How to spend them?

This morning’s Chron has a fantastic story by Marisa Lagos about counties’ preparation for realignment. Among other things, it includes this critique from CJCJ:

Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, said the discrepancies between counties mirror what was already happening in each jurisdiction prior to realignment. The center conducts criminal justice research and provides direct services, including a substance abuse program for adults who are released from prison.


“Most counties are not prepared to meet the challenges of realignment, and for many of them it’s their own fault. They have engaged in bad practices and policies for 30 years,” he said. “The counties that will have the hardest time are some of the Southern California and Central Valley counties that have relied heavily on the state prison system.”


Macallair said probation departments need to change the way they approach their job and rely more on the community.


“What people don’t realize is that even though we’re the state of California and we have one set of criminal laws, you have 58 counties responsible for interpreting and applying those laws and essentially 58 different criminal justice systems,” he said. “You’re going to have well functioning counties able to meet this challenge and a lot that are going to lag behind. There’s nothing uniform about this.”

Fresno County Jail Frees Parole Violators

http://m.fresnobee.com/fresno/db_271104/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=94xC336S
Fresno & Valley News
No room in Fresno Co. Jail for parole violators
Posted: 11/26/2011 10:29 PM

In another sign that Fresno County is struggling to manage more criminals, the sheriff has ordered that state parole violators no longer will be held at the county jail.

The parolees, who were once sent to state prison if they got into trouble, are now sent to local jails instead – part of the state’s recent realignment of the penal system. But in Fresno County, where the jail already is crowded, the Sheriff’s Office has determined there’s no room for the former convicts.

State parole officials, acknowledging counties are being asked to do more under the realignment, say they’ll try to find other ways to deal with problem parolees.

Orders to not lock them up began Thanksgiving Day. While the jail has long been releasing inmates early because of the lack of space, the directive to turn away parolees only reinforces concerns that criminals aren’t serving the time they should.

“They’re out in the community and they’re violating their parole, and when there’s no consequence for violating, that’s going to be a public safety issue,” said Kelly Keenan, chief assistant district attorney for Fresno County.