Rick Perry's Moral Problem

The Texas governor deserves scrutiny for his oversight of the state's death penalty regime


Texas governor Rick Perry, the latest Republican presidential It Boy, is a self-styled moralist who wants his fellow Republicans "to stop apologizing for celebrating life." When did they ever start? And who asked them to apologize for harboring sincere religious or moral objections to abortion anyway? (Abortion rights activists just want them to stop imposing their beliefs on the rest of us.) What we do need to hear from Perry, however, is an apology for celebrating death.

Texas has long been a leader in executing people, and Perry has presided over some 200 executions during his tenure as governor. The most notorious of these was the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, whom any just system would have exonerated, as David Grann demonstrated in the New Yorker. Grann's 2009 article brought some unwelcome publicity to the Texas death penalty regime, the immorality of which Perryconfirmed; he had denied the defense a brief stay of execution citing gross evidentiary errors by the prosecution, and after Willingham's death, he obstructed an investigation of the case.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson cited Perry's role in this execution and cover-up in her unsuccessful 2010 primary campaign against him. So far, however, it has not generally been seen as a potential problem for a Perry presidential bid. This opinion piece in the L.A. Times is one exception to mainstream political coverage that has generally focused on Perry's appeals to culture warriors, his fundraising prowess, and claims about the Texas economy; his liabilities are said to include questions about whether voters are ready to send another Texas governor to the White House and the state's public education's failures.

Perry's record is sure to be extensively critiqued on the left if he continues to attract attention as a possible presidential candidate. Rachel Maddow has already attacked his economic failures and hypocrisies; the stories of Willingham and other death penalty victims are bound to be reviewed. But, on the right, for godly voters supposedly seeking a moral leader, the silence on Perry's complicity in a casually corrupt criminal justice system is damning.

It's worth recalling that George W. Bush's approach to the death penalty briefly became an issue in the 2000 presidential race when Tucker Carlson reported (in short-lived Talk magazine) that Bush had mocked born-again killer Karla Faye Tucker's plea for clemency. (A few years later, Alan Berlow's Atlantic articleexposed the cavalier treatment of clemency appeals by then-governor Bush and his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales.) Rick Perry's fatal disdain for justice demands more than equal scrutiny from activists, right and center, who value their own moral purity.

Could eating poo-burgers save the Earth?

Eat sh*t, cattle farming industry! No, literally, eat sh*t. Japanese scientist Mitsuyuki Ikeda hasdeveloped a way to make meat substitute out of "sewage mud," which is exactly what it sounds like. He extracts (bacterial) protein from what is essentially a soup of human feces, then blends it with soy protein and steak sauce to form a sort of poop patty. According to initial tests, the stuff actually tastes like beef, which raises the question: WHO THE HELL DID THEY GET TO DO THESE TESTS? 

(The funniest thing about that video, by the way, is the artificial hand that Ikeda uses to point to his chart. Because GOD FORBID you touch a CHART. Who knows where those things have been? Okay, time to make the turd burgers!) (No, wait, that's the second-funniest thing. The funniest thing is that THE LAB REFRIGERATOR IS LABELED "SH*T BURGER." BUT WITHOUT THE ASTERISK.)

This isn't just for dubious fun, or even for science -- it's also for the environment. Beef farming is an environmental disaster -- it uses tons of water and feed, and at large scales it's inhumane to boot. Meatpacking releases 18 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases, from the methane in livestock. And climate change is already leading to food shortages that will need to be addressed. If we can avoid all that nonsense with a simple sh*tburger, isn't it worth it?

Probably not. I mean, you'd be eating poo. That's sort of the quintessential thing that humans don't like to do (although maybe dogs know something we don't?). Also, by the way, it costs about ten or 20 times more than regular meat right now, because of the cost of research, so we could be talking Kobe-beef-and-gold burger prices to eat a sh*t sandwich. But the cost will go down after the research is completed -- after all, talk about a renewable resource. Plus, it has less fat apparently? And people will eat anything if it has less fat, even yogurt.

Gil Garcetti: California's death penalty doesn't serve justice

March 25, 2011 |  2:28 pm

Gil Garcetti, district attorney of Los Angeles County from 1992 to 2000, responds to a March 25 Times Op-Ed article on California's death penalty. If you would like to share your thoughts on a recent Times article, editorial or Op-Ed and would like to participate in Blowback, here are our FAQs and submission policy.  

Retired Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin expresses clear and persuasive reasons  why California should abolish the death penalty. I was the Los Angeles County district attorney for eight years and chief deputy district attorney for four years. During those years, I was responsible for my office's decision to seek the death penalty in dozens of cases. In each case, the facts were so horrific and compelling that I permitted the prosecutors to pursue the ultimate punishment. 

Part of a prosecutor’s responsibility is to seek justice and retribution for the victim of a murder. Of special concern throughout my 32 years as a prosecutor was the effect of a particular crime on the family and close friends of the victim. To me, those family members and friends also became victims of the crime.

Many of these victims were happy when my office sought the death penalty and if the jury returned a death verdict, a result that never came quickly. It was unusual for a capital case to be resolved within a year from the date of the original crime; two to three years was not uncommon. The living victims of a particular crime might think that a death verdict provides closure, but for most, there was no such closure. These victims instead faced years of torment thanks to the incredibly lengthy legal review process required for all cases in which the death penalty is imposed.

A case in point is the punishment imposed on Rodney James Alcala, whom Judge McCartin sentenced to death more than 30 years ago. What is the reason to have a death penalty when Alcala still sits on death row awaiting execution for murders he committed decades ago? Is this justice? Is this really fair to the family and friends of the murdered 12-year-old Robin Samsoe and his four other victims?

California's death penalty does not and cannot function the way its supporters want it to. It is also an incredibly costly penalty, and the money would be far better spent keeping kids in school, keeping teachers and counselors in their schools and giving the juvenile justice system the resources it needs. Spending our tax dollars on actually preventing crimes, instead of pursuing death sentences after they've already been committed, will assure us we will have fewer victims such as Robin Samsoe.

-- Gil Garcetti

Death row's delays

California should take a cue from other states that have dealt with the issue of capital punishment: Just abolish it.

LA Times Editorial

Last year, California added 28 inmates to the state's death row, eight of whom were sentenced in Los Angeles County. They aren't in much danger of an early demise, however, thanks largely to legal delays, including a decision Tuesday by state officials not to pursue executions in 2011. The seemingly never-ending court battles mean that convicts in capital cases are far more likely to die of natural causes than by lethal injection. But that won't stop them from costing taxpayers an estimated three times more than other inmates.

Not for the first time, this gives us cause to wonder what good the death penalty in California is doing. Gov. Jerry Brown also personally opposes death sentences, though he appears to lack the courage of his capital convictions. The solution is in plain sight and has been pursued successfully by other states, including Illinois earlier this year: Abolish capital punishment.

The budget-minded Brown last week canceled plans to build a new death row at San Quentin State Prison, noting that it was hard to justify spending $356 million on housing for convicted murderers while services for children, the disabled and seniors were being slashed to the bone. Fair enough. But deferring the problem won't make it go away, as California lawmakers discovered after their practice of ignoring a worsening prison overcrowding crisis was finally ended when federal judges declared the state guilty of unconstitutionally cruel punishment. Similarly, the state can't go on adding to the death row population indefinitely while failing to address San Quentin's severe capacity and design problems.

There are 713 inmates on death row, yet the state hasn't executed anyone since 2006 (29 have died of natural causes since then). Confronted with similar costs and delays, along with evidence that some death row inmates had been wrongfully convicted, four states have abolished the death penalty since 2007. In Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn dealt with existing death row inmates by commuting their sentences to life without parole, an elegant solution that would end California's legal and budgetary problems at a stroke.

California lawmakers aren't inclined to follow Illinois' lead, and Brown has shown no interest in pushing them. He says this is because he respects the will of the majority, which has shown strong support for the death penalty in the past. But Brown might want to consult more recent polls. A 2010 Field poll showed that although 70% of the state's voters favor capital punishment, a slight majority said that if given a choice between imposing a sentence of death or life without parole in first-degree murder cases, they'd choose the latter. Replacing capital punishment with life imprisonment isn't necessarily a political death sentence.

Death penalty costs California $184 million a year, study says

A senior judge and law professor examine rising costs of the program. Without major reforms, they conclude, capital punishment will continue to exist mostly in theory while exacting an untenable cost.

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The witness room for victims' family outside the new lethal injection chamber at San Quentin State Prison. California hasn't executed a prisoner since 2006. (Wally Skalij, Los Angeles Times / September 21, 2010)

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

June 20, 2011

Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty's costs.

The examination of state, federal and local expenditures for capital cases, conducted over three years by a senior federal judge and a law professor, estimated that the additional costs of capital trials, enhanced security on death row and legal representation for the condemned adds $184 million to the budget each year.

The study's authors, U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, also forecast that the tab for maintaining the death penalty will climb to $9 billion by 2030, when San Quentin's death row will have swollen to well over 1,000.

In their research for "Executing the Will of the Voters: A Roadmap to Mend or End the California Legislature's Multi-Billion-Dollar Death Penalty Debacle," Alarcon and Mitchell obtained California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records that were unavailable to others who have sought to calculate a cost-benefit analysis of capital punishment.

Their report traces the legislative and initiative history of the death penalty in California, identifying costs imposed by the expansion of the types of crimes that can lead to a death sentence and the exhaustive appeals guaranteed condemned prisoners.

The authors outline three options for voters to end the current reality of spiraling costs and infrequent executions: fully preserve capital punishment with about $85 million more in funding for courts and lawyers each year; reduce the number of death penalty-eligible crimes for an annual savings of $55 million; or abolish capital punishment and save taxpayers about $1 billion every five or six years.

Alarcon, who prosecuted capital cases as a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney in the 1950s and served as clemency secretary to Gov. Pat Brown, said in an interview that he believes the majority of California voters will want to retain some option for punishing the worst criminals with death. He isn't opposed to capital punishment, while Mitchell, his longtime law clerk, said she favors abolition. Both said they approached the analysis from an impartial academic perspective, aiming solely to educate voters about what they are spending on death row.

Alarcon four years ago issued an urgent appeal for overhaul of capital punishment in the state, noting that the average lag between conviction and execution was more than 17 years, twice the national figure. Now it is more than 25 years, with no executions since 2006 and none likely in the near future because of legal challenges to the state's lethal injection procedures.

The long wait for execution "reflects a wholesale failure to fund the efficient, effective capital punishment system that California voters were told they were choosing" in the battery of voter initiatives over the last three decades that have expanded the penalty to 39 special circumstances in murder, the report says.

Unless profound reforms are made by lawmakers who have failed to adopt previous recommendations for rescuing the system, Alarcon and Mitchell say, capital punishment will continue to exist mostly in theory while exacting an untenable cost.

Among their findings to be published next weekin the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review:

The state's 714 death row prisoners cost $184 million more per year than those sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A death penalty prosecution costs up to 20 times as much as a life-without-parole case.

The least expensive death penalty trial costs $1.1 million more than the most expensive life-without-parole case.

Jury selection in a capital case runs three to four weeks longer and costs $200,000 more than in life-without-parole cases.

The state pays up to $300,000 for attorneys to represent each capital inmate on appeal.

The heightened security practices mandated for death row inmates added $100,663 to the cost of incarcerating each capital prisoner last year, for a total of $72 million.

The study's findings replicated many of those made by the bipartisan California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice in 2008, and a year later, when the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California researched the death penalty's fiscal effects ahead of public hearings on how to revise lethal injection procedures after a federal judge ruled the state's practices unconstitutional.

As with the recommendations in Alarcon's 2007 report, none of the remedies outlined by the commission chaired by former Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp has been adopted by lawmakers or put to the public for a vote.

All of the examinations have pointed to a shortage of death penalty-qualified attorneys in the state as a prime cause of the delays in handling appeals from death row prisoners. At the time of the commission's report, it took an average of 10 years for a condemned inmate to get his death sentence reviewed by the California Supreme Court, as required by law.

Michael Millman, executive director of the California Appellate Project, says more than 300 inmates on death row are waiting to have attorneys assigned to work on their state appeals and federal habeas corpus petitions. He says there are fewer than 100 attorneys in the state qualified to handle capital cases because the work is dispiriting and demanding and the compensation inadequate.

Death penalty advocates argue that the lack of attorneys qualified to represent death row inmates in a state with a bar membership over 230,000 is deliberate.

"Choking off the appeals is part of the strategy" of those opposed to capital punishment, Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, says of what he calls unnecessarily elaborate state court requirements for taking on death penalty cases.

In their report, Alarcon and Mitchell raise the prospect of costly new legal challenges to the state's handling of capital inmates because of the dozens who have died while waiting for lawyers to be assigned for their appeals. Of the 92 death row inmates who have died since 1978, only 13 were executed in California and one was executed in Missouri, while 54 died of natural causes, 18 by suicide and six by inmate violence or undetermined causes.

Federal judges find fault with about 70% of the California death row prisoners' convictions and send them back to the trial courts for further proceedings, the report noted. That could make the state vulnerable to charges of denying inmates due process, the authors warned.

The report also says the corrections department and the Legislative Analyst's Office failed to honestly assess and disclose to the public what 30 years of tough-on-crime legislation and ballot measures actually cost.

"We hope that California voters, informed of what the death penalty actually costs them, will cast their informed votes in favor of a system that makes sense," the report concludes.

carol.williams@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Biker pulled over by NYPD for sexy outfit: 'I thought he was joking'

BY CHRISTINA BOYLE

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Cycling while sexy could be hazardous to city motorists - just ask Jasmijn Rijcken.
The leggy Dutch tourist said she was pulled over by an NYPD cop for flashing too much skin while on two wheels.
"He said it's very disturbing and it's distracting the cars and it's dangerous," Rijcken told the Daily News. "I thought he was joking around but he got angry and asked me for ID."
Rijcken, 31, was not given a ticket during the May 3 incident and did not get the officer's name, but was left feeling baffled.
"I didn't even think for one second that my outfit could be harmful or disturbing," she said.
As general manager of a Dutch bicycle company, Rijcken was in New York to attend the New Amsterdam Bike Show and hopped on her wheels that sunny day to experience biking in New York City first hand.
She says she got more than she bargained for. "I was on my way back to the hotel when it happened and I changed into pants," she said. "I didn't want to get into trouble again."
NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said: "Whether this story bears even a modest semblance of what actually occurred is impossible to establish without being provided the purported officer's name and getting his side of the story."

Prison Math

What are the costs and benefits of leading the world in locking up human beings?

Veronique de Rugy from the July 2011 issue of Reason

 Listen to Audio Version (MP3)

In 2009, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 1,524,513 prisoners in state and federal prisons. When local jails are included, the total climbs to 2,284,913. These numbers are not just staggering; they are far above those of any other liberal democracy in both absolute and per capita terms. The International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College London calculates that the United States has an incarceration rate of 743 per 100,000 people, compared to 325 in Israel, 217 in Poland, 154 in England and Wales, 96 in France, 71 in Denmark, and 32 in India.

America’s enormously high incarceration rate is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to a 2010 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), U.S. incarceration rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about 100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 people. After 1980, however, the inmate population began to grow much more rapidly than the overall population, climbing from about 220 per 100,000 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683 in 2000, and 753 in 2008.

Why are American incarceration rates so high by international standards, and why have they increased so much during the last three decades? The simplest explanation would be that the rise in the incarceration rate reflects a commensurate rise in crime. But according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the total number of violent crimes was only about 3 percent higher in 2008 than it was in 1980, while the violent crime rate was much lower: 19 per 1,000 people in 2008 vs. 49.4 in 1980. Meanwhile, the BJS data shows that the total number of property crimes dropped to 134.7 per 1,000 people in 2008 from 496.1 in 1980. The growth in the prison population mainly reflects changes in the correctional policies that determine who goes to prison and for how long. 

Mandatory minimum sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s played an important role. According to the CEPR study, nonviolent offenders make up more than 60 percent of the prison and jail population. Nonviolent drug offenders now account for about one-fourth of all inmates, up from less than 10 percent in 1980. Much of this increase can be traced back to the “three strikes” bills adopted by many states in the 1990s. The laws require state courts to hand down mandatory and extended periods of incarceration to people who have been convicted of felonies on three or more separate occasions. The felonies can include relatively minor crimes such as shoplifting. 

What have longer prison sentences accomplished? Research by the Pew Center on the States suggests that expanded incarceration accounts for about 25 percent of the drop in violent crime that began in the mid-1990s—leaving the other 75 percent to be explained by things that have nothing to do with keeping people locked up.

As for the costs, state correctional spending has quadrupled in nominal terms in the last two decades and now totals $52 billion a year, consuming one out of 14 general fund dollars. Spending on corrections is the second fastest growth area of state budgets, following Medicaid. According to a 2009 report from the Pew Center on the States, keeping an inmate locked up costs an average of $78.95 per day, more than 20 times the cost of a day on probation.

More important is the long-term impact that the tough-on-crime policies of the last two decades have had on prisoners and society. Housing nonviolent, victimless offenders with violent criminals for years on end can’t possibly help them reintegrate into society, which helps explain why four out of 10 released prisoners end up back in jail within three years of their release.

As the Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and the University of Washington sociologist Becky Pettit showed in a 2010 study published by the Pew Center on the States, incarceration has a lasting impact on men’s earnings. Taking age, education, school enrollment, and geography into account, they found that past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks, and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent. Only 2 percent of previously incarcerated men who started in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution made it to the top fifth 20 years later, compared to 15 percent of never-incarcerated men who started at the bottom. 

It isn’t just offenders whose lives are damaged. Western and Pettit note that 54 percent of inmates are parents with minor children, including more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers. One in every 28 children has a parent incarcerated, up from 1 in 125 just 25 years ago. Two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

While we don’t yet have data on the income mobility of these children, Rucker C. Johnson of the Goldman School of Public Policy found in 2009 that children whose fathers have been incarcerated are significantly more likely than their peers to be expelled or suspended from school (23 percent compared to 4 percent). Johnson found that family income, averaged over the years a father is incarcerated, is 22 percent lower than family income the year before his incarceration. Even in the year after the father is released, family income remains 15 percent lower than it was the year before incarceration. Both education and parental income are strong indicators of a child’s future economic mobility. 

Attempts to estimate the costs and benefits of prison have proved difficult and controversial. In 1987, for example, the National Institute of Justice economist Edwin Zedlewski used national crime data to calculate that the typical offender commits 187 crimes a year and that the typical crime exacts $2,300 in property losses or in physical injuries and human suffering. Multiplying these two figures, Zedlewski estimated that the typical imprisoned felon is responsible for $430,000 in “social costs” each year he is free. Dividing that figure by an annual incarceration cost of $25,000, he concluded that the public benefits of imprisonment outweigh the costs by 17 to 1.

Zedlewski’s findings have been debunked many times. A severe rebuttal came from the Boalt Hall Law School penologists Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, who argued in a 1988 article published by the National Council of Crime and Delinquency that Zedlewski overstated the net benefit of incarceration by inflating the numerator (crimes per offender and social costs per crime) and deflating the denominator (annual cost of confinement). They cited several studies to bolster their charge, including one indicating that the typical offender commits 15 (as opposed to 187) crimes in a year. According to a 1991 Brookings paper by John J. DiIulio and Anne Morrison Piehl, making this one adjustment to the calculations reduces the benefit/cost ratio to 1.38. In other words, the benefit of incarceration is probably small, especially compared to the high cost of locking people up. Also note that Zedlewski assumed imprisoned offenders were predatory criminals, although a substantial share of real-world convicts are guilty only of victimless crimes.

Fortunately, economists are getting better at understanding how to keep people out of jail. In a 2007 paper for Economic Inquiry, for instance, the U.C.–Santa Barbara economist Jeff Grogger found there are large deterrent effects from increased certainty of punishment and much smaller, generally insignificant effects from increased severity. Such findings call into question the economic rationality of increasingly long prison terms. Who knows how many more millions will be locked up by the time public policy finally catches up with economics? 

Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy (vderugy@gmu.edu) is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She writes a monthly economics column for reason.

Less Time, Less Crime

Conservatives lead a movement toward “tough and smart” sentencing policies.

We are in the early stages of a sentencing revolution. Across the country, states seem to be racing each other to cast off their failed, budget-draining mandatory sentencing regimes in favor of smarter, more efficient alternatives. Surprisingly, this movement is being spearheaded by conservatives.

Julie Stewart from the July 2011 issue of reason.com

In 2007 the blood-red state of Texas, facing a skyrocketing prison population that would have required more than $1 billion for additional facilities, decided to shift resources to treatment programs. Gov. Rick Perry, a conservative Republican, called the move “tough and smart,” a view that was vindicated when both crime and incarceration rates dropped. Texas is continuing to enact evidence-based reforms that aim to rehabilitate offenders, such as hiring dozens of re-entry coordinators to help newly released inmates adjust to life outside prison, thereby reducing the number who commit new crimes and end up back behind bars. 

Before leaving office last year, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, also a Republican, signed a comprehensive reform bill that diverts low-risk, nonviolent offenders into community corrections programs rather than state prisons. The new law will save money while helping offenders make the transition back into their communities.

In the first few months of this year, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, and Oklahoma hopped on the reform bandwagon. Not one of those states was carried by Barack Obama in 2008. The governors pushing hardest for reform right now include Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, and Ohio’s John Kasich. All three are beloved by conservatives.

Skeptics say the conservative conversion has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with saving money. Even if that were true, so what? Corrections spending is totally out of hand; according to the Pew Center on the States, it is now the second fastest growing line item in state budgets, trailing only Medicaid. As the UCLA criminologist Mark Kleiman told the Boston Phoenix earlier this year, budget reduction might be “the least good reason” to support sentencing reform, but “in this case, the goal of saving money, and the goal of not keeping people in cages, gets you to the same place.”

Some traditionally blue states also have arrived at that place. In 2009 New York finally overthrew the nearly 40-year-old Rockefeller drug laws, a grotesque set of mandatory minimum sentencing rules that the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard, back in 1979, called “a fiasco” and “the epitome of the belief in treating a social or medical problem with jail and the billy club.” Months after New York acted, Rhode Island abandoned its drug-related mandatory minimums.

Cost is not the sole factor in these changes. None of these states has decided to roll the dice with public safety. Rather, they are looking for ways to keep crime under control more efficiently. In fact, many of these debates demonstrate that policy makers are familiar with the last three decades of criminal justice research, which shows punishment is a more effective deterrent when it is swift and certain rather than severe, and that a vibrant parole system with effective re-entry programs is a better way to rehabilitate nonviolent offenders than making them languish in prison.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Congress is behind the curve. The rising federal prison population has pushed federal facilities to 35 percent over capacity. Half of all prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders serving mandatory sentences. There is no parole, and early release for good behavior is limited. Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of the federal system, both morally and financially, is the unwillingness to let the frail and elderly go home to die.

In 2010, to its credit, Congress finally reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. The gap, created in the mid-1980s under a Republican administration and Democratic Congress, had become a symbol of all that is wrong in federal sentencing. It was enacted without study or debate, its requirement of mandatory prison terms for minor offenders was draconian, and its uneven application devastated minority communities. 

By the time the bill to shrink the disparity came to the floor of the U.S. House, well-known conservatives, including Grover Norquist and Ward Connerly, wrote in support of reform. No one in either chamber voted against it, and only one House Republican spoke in opposition.

Looking forward, state reformers probably will continue to set the pace. New efforts to scale back mandatory sentencing laws are already under way in states as diverse as Massachusetts and Florida. Prospects at the federal level remain less clear. The Obama Justice Department has proposed some policy fixes that would slightly reduce the prison population, but it also has signaled a willingness to consider new mandatory minimums for various crimes du jour. Perhaps more ominous, the one Republican to speak against the crack reform bill was Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). Smith is the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. 

Julie Stewart (Julie@famm.org) is president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national sentencing reform organization based in Washington, D.C.

Myth Busters of Prisoner Re-Entry

Despite popular belief, there is no federal law barring most former inmates from public housing.
Photo by 2kjb via Flickr

The challenge of steering the 700,000 inmates leaving U.S. prisons every year to the services they need never has been more daunting in a poor economy. Now, the federal government is stepping up its work to help the cause.

In a rare show of collaboration, 18 federal agencies that deal with re-entry issues are working together to clarify their practices, and in some cases change their policies, so that states and localities where the ex-prisoners live can better help them find necessities like housing, health care, jobs, and various government benefits.

Yesterday, what is known as the Federal Interagency Reentry Council posted a set of “Reentry MythBusters” as a guide. The material is available on a website, http://www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org/reentry-council, that the Justice Department has funded to provide a wide range of information.

To take one major myth as an example, it’s widely believed that people who have been convicted of a crime are banned from living in public housing. Actually, locally operated public housing agencies can determine their own policies. They are prohibited by federal law from admitting only those with a lifetime registration requirement as a sex offender or people who manufactured meth in public housing.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan is urging housing authorities to help “ex-offenders gain access to one of the most fundamental building blocks of a stable life – a place to live.”

Among other myths debunked on the new web site: that parents with felony convictions cannot receive welfare help under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF),  that former prisoners can’t regain Social Security eligibility, and that ex-inmates are barred from getting federal jobs or federal student financial aid.

It’s true that many government benefits are denied to the 2.3 million people who are behind bars at any given moment. So many terms are so short --  often a matter of a few months – that convicts need help navigating the government benefit maze so that they can maximize the benefits to which they’re entitled.

The federal council is providing states information on how those now incarcerated can apply in advance to reinstate benefits as soon as they are released.

Most inmates are in state institutions, so it’s states that must decide how their practices can be streamlined. One example of a policy change on a federal level: the Veterans Administration now allows the many ex-convicts in community corrections programs like halfway houses to use federal veterans health programs.

One unusual aspect of the federal re-entry council is that it’s being managed by current federal employees with existing federal dollars. The federal Second Chance Act is providing about $83 million this year to help state and local reentry programs, but the federal coordinating work is an Obama administration initiative that wasn’t required by the federal law.

Attorney General Eric Holder has taken a personal role by convening the council, which aims at reducing the big problem of repeat criminality by helping those returning from prisons and jails to become productive citizens.

As reported in The Crime Report, Holder last month asked state governors and attorneys general to review provisions of their laws that hamper ex-prisoners from getting work, education, or other benefits but do not increase public safety. Holder vowed a review of federal laws on the subject.

When Does a Crime Victim’s Criminal History Matter?

Photo by LisaBPhoto

Reporters often turn to murder victims’ criminal records when no other details about motive are available. Critics say this technique can mislead readers –and should be dropped from journalists’ toolkits once and for all.

Young man slain on the street. Unknown assailant at large. Police not saying much.

It's a scenario familiar to any urban police beat reporter. The lack of detail propels journalists who want to do a more complete job of reporting into a search for clues about what precipitated the crime. And often this leads them to the victim's own rap sheet.

Example: Gregory Davenport, 27, was shot to death on the block where he lived in Baltimore’s  Harlem Park neighborhood on March 29. Few facts about the murder were provided by police, but court records helped fill out the gaps in Davenport’s history for Baltimore Sun crime reporter Justin Fenton, who covered the story.

Davenport "sports an extraordinary record of being charged with murder and attempted murder without a conviction," Fenton discovered. "Since 2001, he was charged in such cases five different times, and in the past decade faced serious criminal charges a total of nine times. In each instance, the charges were dropped or he received a light sentence."

In Baltimore, 91 percent of murder victims had criminal histories, a 2007 study by the police department found. So it would seem that Davenport’s death was the culmination of a pattern of criminal behavior.

Lifestyle choices play a large part in victimization. Police chiefs from Baltimore to St. Louis  often point to that fact after major violent crimes to try to quell concerns that their cities are unsafe—on the grounds that it is criminals, not ordinary law-abiding citizens, who are the primary victims. After a surge of homicides in St. Louis in 2004, then-Chief Joe Mokwa noted that few of the killings were random.

"We know that many victims have illicit drugs in their systems, and we know that the majority of victims have had previous encounters with the criminal justice system," he said.

It wasn’t clear that Davenport’s past criminal career  contributed to his death,  and police weren't discussing a motive.  Nevertheless, Fenton believed that Davenport’s criminal history was relevant: the possibility that the murder was in retribution for a previous crime was too great to ignore.

"Tell Ms. Jones down the block that the local drug dealer got killed and she's still unnerved by the crime, but at least she knows what it was about,” he told me and a handful of crime reporters in a discussion over email. (Everyone involved gave me permission to write about the discussion for The Crime Report.)

“Tell her that a 20-year-old man was shot, and she may be more fearful for her own safety, and that of her own kids, than she need be."

He added: "I suppose my fear, frankly, is that while publishing the record may unfairly create the perception that the victim's criminal conduct led to his demise, holding back has the exact opposite effect: that is, people are left with no idea (about) what is happening in their neighborhood."

Fenton filed a blog item on the Sun website that put the spotlight on Davenport’s rap sheet.

But if he could do it over again, he'd reconsider.

Why? Because Davenport's friends and family blasted him in  online reader comments.

‘Nobody’s Business’

"A person's criminal record should not dictate their death," wrote commenter Sheneir on April 1. “His previous convictions (are) nobody's business…he was never convicted of any of the cases presented before him. So many people get away with things in life. Obviously, like the article says, they didn't have enough evidence against him, to prosecute him. I knew this guy, and he was a great guy."

Fenton tried to justify what he did on his blog. "It's important to stress that Davenport was never convicted of the violent charges he faced,” he wrote.  “But in trying to understand why he was killed, the notion that five different families, friends, and associates all were told by police and prosecutors that he was a killer raises the possibility that the crime was retribution."

Reader Samantha wrote: "Well I knew Mr. Davenport and he had a good heart regardless of his criminal 'charges'...that’s what they were NOT convictions."

Fenton responded: "It was laying out an extraordinary record that I hadn't known about until his death. It’s a unique record---whether he was set up, maliciously prosecuted, or got away with murder.

But there were just as many commenters who said, in essence, that what comes around goes around.

"The lawyer should be laying beside him, he's as much to blame as Davenport," wrote commenter uncleollie41. “And the police for not having enough evidence to convict him of a crime. He got his justice."

 Fenton turned to other crime reporters who belong to a listserv run by the national Criminal Justice Journalists organization and asked: What would you do?

The question led to a healthy discussion that started publicly on the listserv,  continued privately, and reverberated in my newsroom at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Crime Reporters Weigh In

Fenton heard from a variety of crime reporters.

I wrote: "If there's no causation apparent, why mention it? You're making a connection for readers that you don't have enough information to make.”

Brian Haas at The Tennessean in Nashville wrote:

"One way I try to look at it is like this: This may be the last thing written about this person ever. Is their criminal history relevant? Does it help the reader understand why they were killed? And does it illuminate what is going on in the community? Or would it cause needless pain for the victim's family?”

"I think the maxim 'minimize harm' applies in those cases,” Haas continued. “If there isn't a connection between the criminal record and their murder (even a loose connection of, say, poor decision making), I don't see any compelling reason to report that record."

Kim Minugh of the Sacramento Bee wrote:

"I frequently use criminal histories when writing about victims of violent crimes. Obviously, a court record does not define a person, but it can offer a glimpse into their life, their habits, their problems. A series of drug arrests in a person's past might not explain why he was killed, but it could give some context and offer an idea of the kind of life that person was living. I don't think that's blaming, I think that's being truthful."

She also advocated tracking down other sources, such as a victim's relatives or friends.

"Such due diligence, in my book, shows that you are not blindly accepting that a person's criminal record defines them or explains their fate,” she added.

In the end Fenton decided that the critics were right.

"I think I'm going to stop mentioning the records unless there are major, recent convictions,"  he wrote.

One thing is clear: There is a fine line between providing information that reporters consider useful for readers, and alienating or insulting them.

When is it appropriate to discuss a victim’s criminal history? There doesn’t appear to be any news industry standard.

But maybe there should be.

 “We do that (in the)  first week of stories and the victim is a character in the story,” said Kelly McBride, a media ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank. “And in those cases, the criminal history of the victim is less important. The stories where it becomes more important is where we do a whole profile of the victim, maybe a week before the court date, or on the anniversary.”

She continued: “I think it’s relevant for a couple reasons. One, you are trying to give a complete picture; and two, you are offsetting that harmful information (about the suspect) with other information that is likely to give a fuller picture.”

McBride said journalists should push back against the idea that a crime victim's own record is automatically part of the story.

“If you're not getting full picture information” including positive aspects of the victim’s life, she said, “then I think there is a much higher threshold for making a direct connection to the crime.”

Such dilemmas are faced by reporters virtually every day around the country. .

A Death in Cincinnati

On May 10 in Cincinnati, Santino Furr, 20, was fatally shot outside a convenience store while he was holding a 14-month-old child. He had been in court less than an hour earlier on charges of giving a police officer a false identity, and he had a criminal history that included charges for drug possession and heroin―a fact that two area TV news stations reported.

Furr worked part time at a Cincinnati restaurant, “Stuffed on Vine.”  One of the restaurant’s owners told me that Furr’s friends were insulted by the coverage.

“It made it seem like less of a person than he was,” said the owner, who declined to be named.  She claimed that Furr was trying to put his life together.

“That's why we offered him the job here,” she said. “He was convicted of a felony (but) it’s really hard out there. He’d come in every day and say, ‘I’m really trying. I’m really trying, but I can’t find anything out there.’”

I am not sure what the drug convictions had to do with Furr's murder. He wasn't dealing drugs when he was gunned down; he was holding a baby. Maybe his criminal lifestyle had something to do with his murder, and maybe it didn't. To me, reading his rap sheet on the air is blaming the victim, and it sends your readers or viewers a signal that "this guy is not one of you."

In Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on May 5, Mahdi Elting, 26, was gunned down outside a tavern. The PoughkeepsieJournal covered the homicide the same day and then the arraignment the next day of three men accused in the shooting.

On Sunday, May 8, the newspaper came back with another story headlined, “Gun-slay victim Elting had extensive criminal past.”

Noting that "the motive for Elting's homicide remains under investigation," the newspaper reported "state records and Journal archives indicate he had an extensive criminal history."  According to the paper, he recently served three years in prison for a 2006 felony conviction for weapons possession.

But it wasn’t clear how that criminal record fit in with Elting’s murder.

Why build a Sunday story around it, two days after the homicide, when the suspects are in custody?

In Poughkeepsie, Journal City Editor Kevin Lenihan wasn’t interested in talking about the story, saying, “We stand behind our reporting.”

The newspaper's mention of Elting's record stung the victim's family, who believed the young man’s past had no relevance to a senseless murder.

Elting’s parents were “highly offended” by the Journal’s examination of Elting’s criminal history, according to the victim’s first cousin, Lawrence Elting, also of Poughkeepsie.

“They felt like it was an injustice to their child,” Elting told The Crime Report.

Lawrence Elting, is himself connected with the news industry. He’s an account executive for Thompson Reuters.  But he believes the Journal was wrong.  The technique of citing his cousin's questionable past diminished the nature of the crime that was committed against him, Elting believes..

"I won't sugar-coat it," he said. "Mahdi saw his share of trouble. But what needed to be noted was that he was a very devoted child to his mother. He was loved by his aunts and uncles and respected by his peers who were not in a criminal lifestyle."

He added: "A murder victim shouldn't be dragged through the mud like that by the Poughkeepsie Journal."

Fenton, the Baltimore reporter, deserves credit for starting this discussion. The reporters who participated agreed on two best practices: Do your due diligence, and minimize harm.

In a nuanced profile of a criminal case, when we have time and column inches to trace the victim's and suspect's life paths, of course a criminal history is fair game.

But I agree with Lawrence Elting. We are trained as journalists to stick to the facts. When we turn to a victim's criminal record as the solitary reason to explain why he's lying dead in the street, we risk being wrong.

And we risk insulting a whole bunch of readers: the victim's family and friends.

Jeremy Kohler is an investigative reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  He welcomes comments from readers.