The first part of last week’s Board of Supervisors discussion of this fiscal year's budget involved a lengthy review of California’s new “criminal justice realignment” and its effect on the County departments.
Realignment assigns lightweight offenders — those who have committed no serious, violent or sex crimes, also known as “the three nons,” “the non-nons” or “the nons”) to county jails instead of state prison, and given that crime is just about America's last growth industry, how the counties will pay for an influx of the incarcerated has caused great consternation.
Used to be that anyone convicted of a felony with a sentence over one year went to state prison, but when a federal court order required California to reduce prison overcrowding, the state decided that tens of thousands of low intensity inmates could serve their time right at home. This shift of prisoners from state incarceration to County incarceration is known as “realignment.”
Of course all this is going to cost Mendocino County money dependent upon passage of Governor Brown's November tax initiative. If that initiative fails, realignment, funded presently for one year only, will be radically out of alignment.
But there's little expectation that Governor Brown’s tax initiative will pass.
“I'm keeping my fingers crossed about what happens in November,” said Mr. Jim Brown, Mendocino County's Chief Probation Officer.
Supervisor John Pinches interrupted the proceedings to ask Chief Probation Officer Brown how realignment will deal with the likely need for increased facilities to house additional prisoners. Brown answered bluntly: Nothing is being done. No facility expansions, no building remodels. Nothing.
Suck it up, counties, because here they come ready or not.
Realignment's initial one year funding from the state, has paid for the Probation Department's several new officers and several new correctional officers (with new rehabbish titles) who will deal with the increased caseload.
Chief Probation Officer Brown provided some optimism when he told the Board that lately the juvenile hall population has been about half of what it had been in prior years.
“Our juvenile caseloads are significantly lower, which allows our probation officers to do a better job in dealing with the youth and their parents,” said Brown. “A large component of this is educating parents so they can do a better job of educating their kids.”
The realignment program provides funding for improved ways of heading off Mendo’s always plentiful supply of juvenile delinquents.
Supervisor Pinches was skeptical of the way the newly established “Day Reporting Center” will work, asking Chief Probation Officer Jim Brown, “The first thing a person who gets out of prison needs is a job, a source of income. And the best place to get a job is usually in the local community where they're from. If that happens to be Leggett, or Covelo or Laytonville or some far reaching area in this county, how do they meet the reporting requirement? They have a transportation issue and with gas at $4 a gallon even if they do come out of state prison with a good car that is a real issue. How are you actually trying to meet people's needs versus just telling them to show up in Ukiah for the afternoon or something?”
Brown: “We are not asking them to report to the Day Reporting Center in Ukiah. That would be setting them up for failure for the exact same reason that you just mentioned. That's why we have trained our Probation Officers in motivational interviewing and interactive journaling, and we take that that service to them. My North County Probation Officers know how to do all that. They know how to talk to these people.”
Pinches: “So the requirement that they have to show up at the Day Reporting Center is not true?”
Brown: “Right.”
Supervisor John McCowen: “It's decided on a case-by-case basis. And if the first thing someone does when they get out of prison is get a job that's probably the best indicator that they do not intend to go back.”
Brown: “Exactly. We’re excited to be able to take that service to them.”
Pinches: “How is that training being done?”
Brown: “We contract with a firm called assessments.com. They provide a lot of our motivational interview training. And they provide training on how to do the evaluations and risk assessments and in identifying what services those offenders need. Our probation officers compile that information and my North County Probation Officer goes to Covelo on a weekly basis and meets with the clients and looks at their journals. He might note that the probationer is having a real tough time with his peers, his old friends, and he’ll get in trouble again. So there is a specific book about how you can you change your peers…"
McCowen: “So part of the day reporting requirement is to keep a daily journal and then review it with a probation officer when he has the opportunity to be out there and see them personally?”
Brown: “Yes. And we help them work on it. Most of our offenders probably have a second or third grade education so we will actually sit down and talk to them and help them. Why did you write this down? What was the reasoning when you responded this way? It's a cognitive thinking, positive behavioral approach.”
Brown said he currently had 63 prisoners who have been released from state prison under probation supervision. By June of 2013 he expects that total will be 103, noting, “Once we level out we expect to have about 75 people on supervision at any one time.”
Pinches: “This is creating a devastating effect on our conservation camps.” (State prisons have provided much firefighting labor. The way funding will be set up now this labor will be severely cut.) “We benefit every day from our conservation camps with firefighters and road crews all year round. Our conservation camps are a tremendous benefit to Mendocino County. The way it's going right now in a five-year period we will have our conservation camps devastated.”
Sheriff Tom Allman came forward: “Your concerns are very valid. But it's not five years, it's closer to nine months. On September 26th the state is coming here to meet with us and several other sheriffs who have fire camps in our counties. There is something about it that just doesn't make sense. If the state says they are going to fill their fire camps with people who are non-sex-offenders, nonviolent and nonserious offenders and still keep fire camps under Calfire, that doesn't make sense because 100% of those inmates are coming to county jail. The possibility of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation increasing the number of dangerous inmates who are coming into our fire camps is where my concern is… So now the state is asking the counties to pay money to send our inmates to fire camps, which would actually cost the Sheriff's Office more than what we are getting from the state for us to take these inmates. I do not want to sound confusing, but I do want to assure the Board that this is one of the top three priorities that the Sheriff's Department is working on right now. Our fire camps are very important. Not just for fires but for brushclearing, for flood emergency response, or missing persons. They are a critical resource to the Sheriff's Office and to the citizens. However, we are not going to allow dangerous people to get into the woods like Jackson State Forest because of what happened — a good example is what happened last year in 36 days and a quarter of $1 million was spent trying to find one person.” (Aaron Bassler.)
District Attorney David Eyster had a comment on the fire camps too: “One of the things that I do is to review all the walkaway escapees from fire camp and the people who smuggle contraband into fire camps. So far since I have been District Attorney we have had six of those. It was a surprise to me that those six folks that I prosecuted, not a single one of them didn't have a strike on their record. I was under the impression, as a lot of folks are, that the fire camps were being populated by non-nons, but that's not true. As they started to reassign and classify people we have had people coming out to our fire camps who have either serious or violent felonies on their records. So what we are doing is we are using those strikes to take them away from the fire camps and send them back into the mainstream prisons and we are also making sure that the fire camps, and I agree with the Sheriff that the folks who are out there are cooperative — we do a very good job of trying to explain to the inmates out there that if you participate in walkways or smuggling or the like the chances of you being prosecuted for that crime plus having your strike added in is probably 100%. If you want to lose a pretty good life for a prison inmate — no fences, no signs for out of bounds, decent food, outdoor work, that sort of thing — there will be consequences if you have a walk away. I'm not sounding an alarm, the security still seems to be pretty good.”
DA Eyster’s realignment assessment continued: “Generally speaking as you take a look at who's going to realignment County prison, you are looking at basically property crimes — thefts, receiving stolen property, things of that sort. The majority of people you see going to county prison are drug-related. Unfortunately, a very large percentage of those people are people who have been convicted of possession of methamphetamine for sale. … We had twelve defendants go to realignment county prison in the first three months of the program in late 2011. At that same time there were 17 defendants going to state prison. The year before there were 22 defendants. So our present commitments between 2010 and 2011 were up 24%. So yes we are doing this, but that doesn't mean the numbers are shrinking. Part of this is due, if I may say so, to our staff has been more effective in their prosecutions, better at deciding what cases should be prosecuted and we've had more quality control on the back end of the cases, the sentences and who gets them. Through the first eight months of 2012 we have 37 defendants going to realignment County prison. During that same time we had 67 defendants going to state prison. The law has the punishments in place and kept the credits, but still if a person is a true recidivist who isn't in a strike situation or a sex situation they can rack up a lot of time and that will come against our jail because they [we] have to house them. So far we have not yet been required to go beyond a five-year commitment. … If you have a strike in your background you would be disqualified from county prison sentences.”
Supervisor Pinches, whose daughter recently plead guilty to a misdemeanor marijuana charge, had personal experience with the Day Reporting Center experience: “I was the first one to question what this contract was all about,” said Pinches. “Now I find myself sitting here today with the Sheriff and the District Attorney and the judge who placed my daughter in the BI [BI Incorporated is the Boulder Colorado-based national outfit that the County has contracted with to operate the Day Reporting Center] program and I have nothing but good to say for your program. What struck me about her getting into it was how they take a customer friendly attitude, like they’re there to actually help the situation. So I have a lot of good things to say about your program.”
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