Hard Time

Hadn't been to the bar or the gym in a month, broke both streaks this week, saloon felt better than the gym. Been fighting the allergy/respiratory thing.

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Birdman of Alcatraz, Robert Stroud

I have never been to the big house, spent a week in jail up in Spokane for tax evasion (jumped the fence at the World's Fair, 25 cent admissions tax) when I was 16. That was in my drop out of high school and hitchhike around the country phase. Smarted off to a cop once at the Shrine Auditorium and ended up at L.A. County for a night, no fun at all.

Trumped up evidence, ended up costing me a lot of money but the charges were eventually dropped. Thank you Uncle Norm, ex Los Angeles City Attorney.


Anyway that is the scope of my criminal past or at least what they caught me for. Last week I was reading about the latest snafu where a state computer program that performs risk assessment on felons and parolees somehow misfired last year, mistakenly sending 450 high risk offenders back out on the street, unsupervised.

The State Inspector found that these and about another 1050 prisoners were improperly released and had a high likelihood of committing another violent crime. Under the non-revocable parole statute that secured their release, offenders don’t report to parole agents and can’t be sent back to prison unless they commit new crimes.


Auditors found the risk assessment was wrong for 23.5 percent of more than 10,000 offenders who were considered for non-revocable parole between January and July 2010. Some  scored too high and others too low, with the lower-scoring inmates eligible for unsupervised release. Even after the computer program was altered, analysts determined it was wrong in 8 percent of cases. The system relies on 22 factors that are supposed to predict whether offenders are likely to commit new crimes. They include things like age, gender, gang affiliations, previous convictions, disciplinary problems in prison, and previous parole violations. It then uses a mathematical algorithm to assign a risk score.

The corrections department poo-poohed the report, of course, saying everything had been corrected and was now hunky dory.

The thing that caught my attention amongst all this criminal stuff was the following statistic: even a low risk assessment predicts that 48 percent of those parolees are likely to be arrested for a felony, and 18 percent convicted of a felony, within three years. A moderate risk projects that 69 percent of parolees will be arrested and 31 percent convicted of a felony within three years of their release.

Doesn't this seem awfully high? I was taken aback. Of course, with racially segregated and overcrowded prisons where prisoners are forced to either join gangs or get shanked, it should really come as no surprise. A system where practically all money for education and remediation has been cut. A place where small time crooks get the skills and networking necessary to become big time crooks.

A friend of mine has a son who is in and out of prison (meth, mail theft, etc.). Watching what he has gone through and what the family is forced into after release is amazing. He can't get a license and has to be driven everywhere and the parole people set up a schedule that pretty much assures that he can never get hired. It is no wonder that these people go back to the institutionalized security of three square in the pen, when you see the roadblocks that are thrown in their path. Hence the lousy recidivism figures.

Of course many of these people are just plain bad folks. Real violent criminals. But you also have a three strike law that throws away the key for a guy who has stolen his third pack of cigarettes. Now the state thinks that it wil be able to cram 33,000 prisoners back into already drastically underfunded country and city jails.

We have to find a way to keep the violent, the criminally psychotic, the sexual offenders off the streets. Not rely on faulty algorithms but have real human beings evaluate the huge numbers of people that we currently incarcerate. Something is evidently not working with the current system.

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There was another story last week where a bedridden paraplegic was denied parole in California. His care is costing the citizens $650,000.00 per year. The family wants to take care of him at home, for nothing. The Parole Board says no go, that he was an asshole and needs to be punished. But why punish us, too?