Education vs. Incarceration: The Early Release Program in Illinois

Dan Hynes' criticism of Quinn's early release program is one of the reasons I voted for Quinn, rather than Hynes. Of course, Julia Rietz & the News-Gazette jumped on the early-release hysteria and attempted to make a mountain out of a mole hill. Many people are being sent to prison for trivial offenses: in the case of DUI, we are sending people to prison because of the crimes that we IMAGINE that they might commit in future, rather than the crimes that they have actually committed. This is a dubious legal principle. It's like sending all black adolescent males to prison on the grounds that they are statistically more likely to commit crimes than other demographic groups.

Since the 1980s, the mainstream media has promoted public hysteria over crime. This hysteria contains elements of discrimination against blacks, hispanics, and the poor by those who are affluent and white. One consequence of this hysteria, is the decline in state support for education. The figures in your article on state expenditures for prisons actually underestimates what the state actually spends on the criminal justice system: probation services, parole services, and state-subsidies to local law enforcement and courts are additional costs that your article has not revealed.

At some point, as a society we will have to decide what is more important to us: Are we committed to providing an affordable and quality education to everyone in the state, or are we more interested in incarcerating young adults for increasingly trivial offenses? So far, we've been cutting back funding to public education, but not the criminal justice system. Consider this: During the 1960s, about 50% of the University of Illinois' budget came from the state. Today, only about 10% of the university's budget comes from the state.

Clearly, our lawmakers and many members of the public, notwithstanding their rhetoric, have lost their commitment to funding public education. They are more interested in cutting taxes, providing more subsidies to private businesses that don't need them, and incarcerating more young people and throwing away the key. As a result, there will be more people who are less educated and less employable out in the streets, where they will be more likely to commit crimes.

What is the root condition that causes us to concentrate heavily upon reinforcing our own sense of rightness and proving that others are wrong? Why does America pour so much money into the armed forces and military research? It seems it is this same mentality which places such a lopsided and utterly ridiculous focus on "correctional facilities" - while I am glad they no longer pretend to label them as rehabilitation centers, what exactly are correctional facilities correcting? They are just prisons, a place to ostentatiously punish someone for not adhering to some lawmakers desires.

So let's move beyond the rhetoric; how do we make a change in the system? If I want to see 50% of the state budget go towards helping the poor and education (like that would ever happen), how do I get that done?

Anon 12:36pm's beliefs that

"They [prisons] are a place to keep killers, rapists and thieves away from the decent members of society, so that they can't kill or rape us or steal our stuff. Some people need to be [in prison because]... there are always going to be pathological savages who just get off on hurting people."

supports Anon's 9:27pm's claim that

"...we are sending people to prison because of the crimes that we IMAGINE that they might commit in [the] future, rather than the crimes that they have actually committed."

Clearly, there needs to be an understanding of who is in prison. The belief that there are 45,000 "killers, rapists, and thieves" currently being held in our prisons is a belief probably rooted in total ignorance of who is actually residing in the prisons. It is an ignorance that is equal to the idea that all drug dealers sell to school yard children. Sad that taxpayers are so willing to chuck whatever money is asked for while operating under such mythologies. Quinn Correctional officials know who could be allowed out tomorrow without jeopardizing public safety. As Mr. Dolinar's case study points out, there are people in the system who are not "killers, rapists, and theives".  That the early release program was sabatoged by bureacratic blunders that did allow a very small percentage of offenders out who were too high-risk to be on the street- only stifled the real conversation regarding better use of the prisons beyond just a jobs program for public safety officials and unions. 

If you read again closely, you'll see I mention that most of the 21 cases were for DUIs. All the 1700 early release people were non-violent offenders.

Of the list of 21, I could only get an interview from one person.

Bill Brady tried to do a hit job on Quinn himself when just days after the primary election he claimed some violent criminal was an early release guy.

Turned out the individual had been let out according to state protocol.

So again there are those who would like to point to the worst case scenarios to justify mass incarceration, but the opposite is actually true. Most locked up don't need to be.

BD

Because, you know, crimes ARE going to be committed in the future.  People are going to be robbed and beated up.

How many people are in prison for aggravated armed robbery? Few. Anon 2:31pm's rabid obession that a convicted felon is a killing, raping, armed robbing thug with no conscious is a clear stereotype of anyone convicted of a felony. Again, the definition of who is in prison, what their outlook on life really is, their connections on the outside, and their ability to find meaningful employment is a stronger determination of how well they do outside of the walls. If every prosecution was handled by Anon 2:31pm's outlook- every lawbreaker would be treated like a "killer, rapist, armed robber" which Anon 2:31pm believes lawbreakers to be. Of the 10,000 criminal prosecutions performed in Champaign County yearly, how many should go to prison?

look up Mr Durso's criminal and traffic record on the circuit clerk's site (don't know about what other counties may show...) It is obvious why he earned a prison sentence. it was over due.

I guessed 20%, but that seems too high compared to your guess(?) of: "Only about a sixth of the people currently in prison are in there for violent crimes."

From Anon 3:20pm's Human Psychology piece, a good question arises: "how do we make a change in the system? If I want to see 50% of the state budget go towards helping the poor and education (like that would ever happen), how do I get that done?"

What sticks for you?

1) Mr. Dolinar's financial analysis is correct. Something has got to give. Housing 45,000 people and the caseloads new police officers are generating nowadays against a state 13 Bil in the hole is unsustainable. That's the biggest chink in the armor. The Fraternal Order of Police in Springfield may be asking its members to generate as many criminal cases as possible so as to justify hiring more of our guys, and gals. Champaign County jumped from 5000 criminal prosecutions in 2004 under then-state's attorney, John Piland, and now in 2009, The Regional Planning Commission is reporting Champaign County processed over 10,000 criminal prosecutions for one year. How can we afford the zeal? Or is it the plain fact, people really are committing more crimes? Conspiracy Door #1 or Common Sense Door #2- whichever you choose, we can't afford the reality of just incarcerating people ad infinitum. Which is better to have more of: taxpayers or tax drainers. Inmates or Homeowners? 

2) Expose sucessful programs (Like Hip Hop Detoxx, V.E.Y.A., Center for Women in Transition, One to One Mentoring, and The Oddessy Project to name a few) that prevent people from committing crimes: i.e. programs that get people off drugs, house them, train them, and employ people will reveal to politicians the cost saviings of addressing crime and proverty at the front end, rather than policing, prosecuting, and penalizing after the fact. But it will be an uphill battle against the police and correctional officer unions who don't want to lose their precious jobs.

3) Educate, Educate, Educate Your Politicians at every level. Big job. But if the Anti-Smoking Contigent could get cigarettes kicked out of taverns, anything is possible in America. The battle for message in the media is already very understood by law enforcement.

4) Repeal many of the bans on employment and barriers to financial aid for college that currently exist against felons. When you work or go to school, you don't have time, inclination, nor need to find a crooked way to get money.

Just a few guesses......

20 from Champaign County part of release program

Sat, 01/23/2010 - 9:56am | Mary Schenk

Early release plan haunting Quinn

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn just can't shake the early release prison scandal.

Years ago, former Texas U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was caught charging well-heeled lobbyists thousands of dollars just for the privilege of having breakfast with him.

Embarrassed by the disclosure, Bentsen lamented, "When I make a mistake, it's a doozy."

Gov. Pat Quinn could say the same thing. He embraced an early release program for state prison inmates, and the results continue to haunt him.

Bentsen was able to weather his political storm with a good-natured confession of misjudgment and a promise never to make a similar mistake again.

But while acknowledging the disastrous nature of the program and then suspending it, Quinn has been less than forthcoming about what he knew and when he knew it, attempting to shift all the blame to an underling, Department of Corrections Director Michael Randle.

Meanwhile, state Comptroller Dan Hynes is attacking Quinn mercilessly for the ill-advised early release program, and polls show Hynes is scoring points. What once looked like a runaway win for Quinn in the Feb. 2 Democratic Party primary now looks close, and getting closer. All the momentum is on Hynes' side.

So if Quinn loses, he can chalk it up to letting inmates – some of whom were convicted of violent crimes – out of prison after having served only a few weeks behind bars. The Associated Press, which broke this story in December, reports that the corrections department was able to justify pushing inmates out the door by suspending a DOC rule requiring a minimum stay of 61 days for all inmates and granting newly arrived inmates six months of unearned meritorious good time credit.

There's a lesson here about how government operates, one that justifies considerable skepticism about bureaucracies assigned to carry out government policy.

For starters, according to Quinn, the inmates selected for early release were supposed to be carefully selected, and those convicted of violent crimes forbidden from consideration. The DOC bureaucracy turned that rule on its head, giving good time sentence reductions to those who hadn't earned it and disregarding the order that inmates convicted of violent crimes were not to be considered.

DOC now says it released 1,745 prisoners under the so-called "MGT push" program, a figure that is higher than the figure of 1,718 Quinn acknowledged. Further, DOC's new figures show that, according to the AP, "the names of 250 new offenders were added and 223 who hadn't benefited from MGT Push were removed for a net increase of 27."

What's striking is that DOC is confused about who was let go and why, even though this was a special program initiated from the very top. The bureaucrats are blaming an antiquated computer system for their problem keeping track of who's who, but it speaks volumes about how sloppily this ill-advised program was run.

Of course, it never should have come to this. Releasing inmates early is bad policy, and bad policy is supposed to translate to bad politics for the elected official responsible.

In this case, that's Quinn, and the political timing could not be worse. He's compounded the problem with his incredible denials and his obfuscation of the facts. If Quinn goes down in the Feb. 2 primary, it'll be because his "MGT Push" program inadvertently pushed him out of office.

This morning's guest on the 11am Focus on AM 580, Dr. Mark A.R. Kleiman,  provided considerable fresh air to counter the stale arguments of the brute force boosters that have managed to fill our prisons with little to show for the massive expenditures involved in jailing more prisoners in the US than in any other country, including China. Here's a link to the show's annoucement:

http://will.illinois.edu/focus/interview/focus100720b/

The subject of the interview was Dr. Kleiman's new book, When Brute Force Fails:How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. The audio of the show should be posted soon at the WILL link.

Excellent article.  The "secret" terminology was pure political theater, thanks for noting that.  IDOC has always had the ability to release inmates early, at their discretion.  This is clearly stated in the Illinois Compiled Statutes!  There was no more secrecy for MGT Push than there is when the average inmate is awarded the good time available to them via this legislation.

Also important to note, that the recidivism rate was no higher for the MGT Push group than it is for released inmates in general.  Why should we expect the MGT Push group to be any better behaved or better supported by friends and family?

To the person who wrote that "releasing inmates early is bad policy", you obviously don't understand the reasoning behind early release.  MGT Push aside, early release is EARNED.  It causes most inmates to be far better behaved than they would be otherwise, which in turn creates a safer environment for the corrections officers and others who work in the prisons.  Apparently you don't care about what they have to deal with.

People in the criminal justice system (and outside of the criminal justice system) don't understand the underlying probability models of drug testing. Drug tests aren't nearly as reliable as they're portrayed. There are two major causes for this problem:

1) People are exposed to thousands of different chemicals everyday. Some of these chemical are manufactured within the human body, while others are absorbed in various ways from the environment. Because there are so many chemicals in the blood or urine of each person, false alarms from drug testing are common place. It is not possible, in a laboratory setting, to validate a drug test in relation to thousands of these chemicals -- some of which are unknown or poorly understood. Therefore, if it is stated that a drug test is 95% reliable, it should be understood that this is the reliability of the test under controlled laboratory conditions. However, the criminal justice applies these tests to people in the real world, where many of the assumptions of these laboratory conditions have been violated to a greater or lesser degree. To use a simple example, consider this: Several million people in the United States are prescribed anti-depressants. Some of these anti-depressants stimulate the dopamine neurotransmitter system. For this group of anti-depressants, the human body eventually converts the prescribed drug via the liver into m-amphetamine ("meth") or a closely related amphetamine-like chemical before it is discharged from the body through urination. As a result, people on this group of prescription drugs can (and do) test positive for m-amphetamine. To a lesser extent, certain kinds of food (e.g., chocolate) also stimulate the dopamine neurotransmitter system. The stimulants in these foods are also transformed by the liver to amphetamine-related chemicals, and false positives from drug testing can result. I don't think people in the criminal justice system understand the full magnitude of this problem. As a result, innocent people are being sent to prison unnecessarily in the name of the "drug war."

2) To evaluate the reliability of a drug test in a given situation, it is necessary to know in advance the base rate of occurrence of the tested substance in the target population. Suppose that a drug test is determined to have 95% reliability in a controlled laboratory setting. This means that if a person is known to be taking m-amphetamine, there is a 95% probabilty that this person will test postive for the drug. This also means that for a person who is known NOT to be taking m-amphetamine, there is only a 5% chance that this person will test positive for the drug. A big problem arises, however, when you don't know in advance who is, and who is not, taking m-amphetamine in a real world setting. Suppose that among the general population, about 5% of this population is taking m-amphetamine at a given moment in time. You randomly select a group of people from this population and test them for the presence of this drug. Is this drug test still 95% reliable? Absolutely not! You have to apply the appropriate probability model to determine its reliabilty, which involves the use of Baye's Theorem. The true reliability of this drug test can be calcalated as follows:

Test Reliability = (95% x 5%) / P(+),

where P(+) is the probability of a positive test result for a member of the population. P(+) is calcalated as follows:

P(+) = P(f+) + P(t+) = (95% x 5%) + (5% x 95%) = 9.5%

where P(f+) = probability of a false positive
and P(t+) = probability of a true positive

Thus:

Test Reliability = (95% x 5%) / 9.5% = 50%

This means that the reliability of this drug test in this instance is only 50% -- no better than flipping a coin, or random chance! For more information about Baye's Theorem, see Wikipedia. It has a good example on the reliability of a drug test in an employment setting. However, even Baye's Theorem has a tendency to overestimate the reliability of a drug test across repeated applications because it makes the implicit assumption that the errors of the drug test are uncorrelated. However, in the real world, this idealized assumption is not necessarily valid because the errors can be correlated. This can happen when a test can't discriminate between consumption of m-amphetamine versus consumption of anti-depressants or chocolate, for example, as discussed in Problem #1 above. Other causes of correlated errors are defects in the manufacture of the tests, an employee at the lab fudging the results of the drug test, etc., etc.

Some commentators seem to think that the criminal justice system knows what it is doing when people are sent to prison because of a positive drug test. Trust me, this system doesn't have a clue about the underlying probability models of these drugs tests.

by Elisabeth Renter

They say your priorities are reflected in how you spend your money and time. If that's the case, consider the fact that California spends $216,000 per youth it locks up, but spends just $8,000 on each student in Oakland's public schools.

Right now, states across the nation spend far more to punish juvenile offenders than to prevent their criminal involvement in the first place. Especially as corrections budgets across the country explode, it's time to take a smarter stance on juvenile justice — before such youth turn into the next wave of incarcerated adults.

New legislation pending in Congress would do just that. In 2008, over 2 million kids were arrested by United States law enforcement agencies. The Youth Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education Act (Youth PROMISE) is designed to prevent such kids from entering the justice system in the first place. By providing at-risk youth with the tools necessary to avoid criminal behavior, this legislation would be a major step in breaking the vicious cycle of incarceration we've constructed.

Join other Change.org readers in telling Congress to pass this important legislation. Take a stand for this country's youth, who are often overlooked until it's too late.

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Entry into a life of crime and incarceration typically begins early. So as we choose to spend billions on prisons, rather than education, we're continuing to shuffle still more children into the system.

After all, it's easy to see youth in the juvenile justice system as a lost cause — social throwaways. It's easy to think of such kids as "not my problem" — because as long as they're not our kids, what do they matter? The fact is, though, that such kids are our neighbors, our potential future leaders and ultimately our collective responsibility. And it's far better to accept that responsibility now, in our schools and our cities, than when youth end up in our prisons.

Back in California, which boasts one of the nation's more lopsided prison-to-schools spending ratios, the need for the Youth PROMISE Act is clear. That's why the Los Angeles County sheriff recently testified before Congress, calling the Youth PROMISE Act "one of the most important pieces of legislation our nation could ever enact." After all, juvenile justice isn't just a California issue — it affects every community and state, whether you're a parent or just a taxpayer.

Show your support for the Youth PROMISE Act by signing the petition below. Let your representatives in Washington know that we value all of our country's children — and that we'd rather see them succeed than become just another statistic.

Tell Congress to Stand Up For Our Children

http://criminaljustice.change.org/

From some of the comments in the preceding discussion, it is clear that some people think intoxicated drivers (pass the blood limit for alcohol) are necessarily more dangerous on the road than non-intoxicated drivers. This is a very simplistic view of the world. In reality, some intoxicated people are better drivers than some non-intoxicated drivers. It is more accurate to regard these two groups of people in a distributional sense: think of a bell-shaped curve for intoxicated drivers, where they vary in their driving ability while intoxicated, and then think of a bell-shaped curve for non-intoxicated drivers, where they also vary in their driving ability while non-intoxicated. When the mean average of driving performance for non-intoxicated drivers is undoubtedly higher than the mean average of driving performance for intoxicated drivers, the tails of these two distributions overlap creating a "gray area" where some intoxicated drivers have better driving performance than some non-intoxicated drivers.

What are the implications of this? One implication is that our criminal justice system is sending intoxicated people to prison who are better drivers than people who are driving legally while not intoxicated (and who are consequently more dangerous on the road). This is clearly a nonsensical result, but nonetheless inevitable whenever people are convicted for crimes that society imagines they might commit in the future on the basis of a statistical average. However, a statistical average doesn't necessary apply to individual people: it is a simplistic stereotype.

by Bill Quigley

The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.

Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.

The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?

Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system – from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.

One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates – according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses – according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.

Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.

Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.

African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites – according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.

Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.

Five. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”

Six. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.

Seven. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial – the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of promise of a longer sentence if a person exercises their constitutional right to trial. As a result, people caught up in the system, as the American Bar Association points out, plead guilty even when innocent. Why? As one young man told me recently, “Who wouldn’t rather do three years for a crime they didn’t commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime they didn’t do?”

Eight. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.

Nine. The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that non-white people will be the ones getting it. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.

Ten. As a result, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Marc Mauer May 2009 Congressional Testimony for The Sentencing Project.

Eleven. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.

Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.

Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.

Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!

So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.

Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans – a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.

Poor whites and people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.

Other critics like Professor Dylan Rodriguez see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book Forced Passages, there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. “These people”, whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.

This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country’s police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror - domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.

What to do?

Martin Luther King Jr., said we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.

A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.

We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?

It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites, or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says “Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system.”

Bill is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans.  He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. 

"This is almost certainly because the police stop more people in high crime areas.  If blacks and Latinos want to stop this disparity, they should see to it that their neighborhoods are not high-crime areas anymore."

Blame the victim? Yeah, that's a real logical coup there. You read the facts, you just perfer to ignore them. Most of the crap people object to is connected to the drug "war" compromising civil rights. White and blacks have roughly the same rates of drug abuse, but who fills the prisons? Yeah, the folks who have the SAME amount of drug abuse -- who happen to be black. Yep, let those black folks change their skin color and move and that will fix that, won't it?

The only circumstances I can see a statement like your making sense even to himself would be for someone to make it is because they are a racist.

BTW, anticipating your whining to come, everyone understands that the News-Gazette won't think it's racist and neither will 9 out of 10 or your white friends don't think so either.

I know, I know. The rest of your shtick is tired and untrue, too. You never address what others bring up, just doodle happy faces on the racist practices which you want to continue.

Definitely not in the meaning of the current slang term, but you are sick.

by Matt Kelley

Crime-tracking and mapping software like CompStat has changed policing. So when will the data revolution reach our courts?

In an excellent New York Times op-ed, Amy Bach writes that while we use sophisticated statistics to assess schools and hospitals and set overall public policy, our courts are still stuck in the Stone Age. They operate as the legal equivalents of obsolete, wood-paneled vacuums — missing countless chances to learn from the successes and failures of other courts. And it doesn't need to be this way.

To change the system, Bach (author of Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court) proposes creating a "justice index" to measure local courts on issues like cost, recidivism, crime reduction and collateral consequences, including whether people lose their jobs or homes after contact with the criminal justice system.

It's a brilliant idea, and I hope courts and policy-makers are listening. Courts are meant to protect the public, and that means they should be helping to reduce crime and improving peoples' lives. Instead, we've come to expect that our court system exists as a dense bureaucracy riddled with inequalities and endless delays.

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The good news is that isolated courts exist there are that are experimenting and improving results through data analysis. Hawaii Judge Steven Alm, for example, looked at the data of cases before him and found that short, certain sentences actually prevent crime and make probation more effective. Likewise, UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman expands on this theme, offering more data in his book When Brute Force Fails. Bach makes the case for a nationwide data project — starting with the country's 25 biggest counties — so that we can concretely establish what types of probation are more effective and learn from counties that have actually succeeded in reducing cost and crime.

To be sure, at this point, the justice system is so thoroughly broken that any kind of substantive data analysis is seriously threatening. However, there's some real momentum behind the issue — particularly in light of the fact that the U.S. House has voted to support the National Criminal Justice Commission (which is now waiting for Senate approval). Data-driven justice is a great goal, but it the meantime, it needs people like you and me behind it.

Mat Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

http://criminaljustice.change.org

State prison release plan was a disaster from the start

Gov. Pat Quinn's stance on his administration's failed early prison release program: blame anyone or everyone but me.

Eight months ago, an embarrassed Gov. Pat Quinn pulled the plug on an early prison release program that had been revealed as a fiasco and appointed a commission to study the matter and report its findings.

Last week, the commission released its report, concluding the "MGT (meritorious good time) Push" program was a fiasco. In other words, it took eight months for investigators to tell the public what it already knew: a bureaucratic effort to save money by releasing prison inmates early degenerated into a mindless effort to show people out the door regardless of whether they had served any significant time behind bars or posed a threat to the public.

Retired appellate judge Dennis Erickson, chairman of the commission, described the effort as a "total failure."

"It failed in its basic purpose, which was to help rehabilitate, to protect the public, to deter crime."

If Gov. Quinn dodged a bullet with the report's finding, it was no accident and completely undeserved.

Quinn has been all over the lot about what he knew about MGT Push and when he knew it. His latest stance is that he knew nothing, even if his closest aides knew all about it, and that DOC Director Michael Randle, the designated fall guy, is completely to blame.

Hey, this is Illinois. Surely, you didn't expect real accountability.

The MGT Push program was one of two early release programs implemented at the same time, one announced publicly by Quinn that was aimed at releasing non-violent offenders approaching the end of their sentences. He said they would be closely monitored after their release to ensure public safety.

The second program, MGT Push, was not announced until the Associated Press, tipped off by sources inside the corrections department, reported that more than 1,000 inmates – many convicted of violent offenses – were being released by DOC almost as soon as they arrived to begin serving their sentence.

DOC justified the MGT releases by awarding six months of meritorious good time to inmates when they arrived, ignoring requirements that inmates have to earn their good time and must serve at least 61 days in prison before qualifying for good time. Under MGT Push, the good time was automatically granted and many inmates served only a few days in prison before being turned loose.

If the goal was to carefully select deserving inmates who could be returned to their communities with minimal risk, the reality was that mindless bureaucrats were simply pushing people out the door to reduce the state's prison population.

That's been tried before and proved a disaster before. If it's tried again sometime down the line, it will be another disaster. Bureaucracies trying to achieve conflicting goals (reduce population and ensure public safety) will always opt to achieve the easier of the goals (simply let people go).

In overseeing this maladministration of Illinois law, Quinn handed his electoral opponents a good issue.

Democratic state Comptroller Dan Hynes almost rode it to victory over Quinn in the Feb. 2 primary election. Now Republican Bill Brady is using MGT Push as evidence that Quinn is not up to the job as chief executive.

MGT Push is, of course, just one issue in a governor's race in which the state's precarious financial status is the top priority.

But Quinn has mishandled MGT Push from the start. He has been less than forthright in acknowledging what he knew and taking responsibility for it. Instead, he has heaped the blame on DOC Director Randle, the prison chief he personally hired for the job. But anyway one looks at it, Quinn dropped the ball.