Prison realignment plan presents challenges

via pe.com 
After four months of California’s realignment program, jail overcrowding, homelessness and inadequate mental health reporting have overburdened local agencies now responsible for prisoners shifted from state to local institutions.

County parole agents and mental health workers have had to deal with a growing number of state prison returnees who have mental health issues, which county officials say were poorly described in their state prison information packets that preceded release.

And a number of former prisoners are declaring themselves homeless, causing placement concerns and leaving county probation officers to check parks and neighborhoods that their assignees give as their living location.

Realignment was initiated Oct. 1 under state law AB 109. It moves from state to county jurisdiction those released from state prison whose most recent crimes were not classified as violent, sexual or serious.

It also declares anyone sentenced after Oct. 1 in those categories will go to county jail rather than state prison, even though sentences may be years longer than the previous county jail limit of one year.

The $6.3 billion measure was passed to meet a federal court order to reduce the state prison population by about 33,000 over the next two years.

The prison population is decreasing, but the jail systems in Riverside and San Bernardino counties have both released inmates early because of overcrowding attributed to the realignment program. Both jails are at their capacities.

Lawmakers agreed in passing realignment that local government resources, including probation, law enforcement, mental health and other service agencies, were more likely to succeed than the state parole system in restoring former inmates to the community. California has a prison recidivism rate of nearly 70 percent.

HOMELESSNESS

Released former convicts must return to the community where they committed their crimes, which may not necessarily be their home. Under the mission to end cycling back into prison, the homeless issue is a cause for concern.

“Housing is a foundation of doing well in our community,” said Maria I. Marquez, a Riverside County Mental Health Services administrator and a chairwoman of a committee looking into finding housing for the returning ex-convicts.

“People would come in, get off the bus and not have a place to go,” said Donna Dahl, one of the county Mental Health Department’s assistant directors.

Riverside County Assistant Chief Probation Officer Mark Hake said that out of the 1,757 prisoner information packets the Probation Department has received as of Tuesday, 217 have indicated they would be homeless on release.

“We get them to define an area they are hanging out at,” Hake said. “And we have them report to our offices more frequently than someone with a residence. Just because they are homeless doesn’t mean we don’t see them in the community and aren’t able to track them down.”

Hake said there are 101 current homeless cases among realignment returnees.

The unexpected numbers of homeless people in community release have county mental health and housing officials trying to find quick solutions for an issue that often takes a year or so to resolve.
Riverside County’s Mental Health Department chief Jerry Wengerd said his office can find placements for those who need mental health or substance abuse treatment, but for former inmates released without those issues, finding a dwelling is more difficult.

Marquez said two prospects are re-entry housing for those just returned and longer-term transitional housing to help them establish roots and look for work. Both are being studied for recommendation by her group. She said there is no funding for such housing.

Marquez acknowledged the challenges.

“Placement in the community is always going to be controversial,” she said. “It serves no one to house someone in a community where it is perceived people are at risk. … We have to navigate around stigma and fear.”

San Bernardino County Probation Chief Michelle Scray said some of those returning ex-prisoners who initially claim to be homeless change their information when they report.

“Some of these people thought they were going to be (nonreporting parolees)” under the system replaced by realignment, Scray said. “They are not going to give you an address if they think they don’t have to.”

MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES

Lack of diagnoses and missing medication information are among the problems in dealing with mental health issues of returning ex-prisoners, Riverside County’s Wengerd said.

“In the world outside the prison system, if there were a referral coming from someplace else, we would receive at least the information about the basic level of care, and the medication list,” Wengerd said in a phone interview. “You could tell from that what to be prepared for. But we are not even getting that from the prison system,” he said.

Prison officials have alerted local care workers about the most severe cases, said Dahl of the Riverside County Mental Health Department. She said five released ex-prisoners were immediately hospitalized on arrival. One, she said, is the subject of a conservator hearing.

A state corrections official acknowledged that mental health officials from some of California’s counties have complained about the content of the information packets, which are delivered 120 days before a state prison inmate is released to local probation agents.

“This is a new issue, because this is a new process,” said Dana Toyama of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “We do have designated staff at each institution that disperses the mental health information to the counties, and we’ve appointed additional staff to help institutions make sure that information gets to the counties. We’ve heard from the counties, and reacted to it.”

“Things are getting somewhat better, but we have a long way to go,” Dahl said. She said her department had identified about 130 returnees as having mental health or substance abuse problems.

Realignment was instituted to reduce California’s prison population, and that is working.
At the end of September, there were 151,283 inmates in California prisons; by the end of December, there were 13,009 fewer at 138,274.
“We know there are some issues with realignment,” San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos said. “But you balance that with just opening the gates of prisons with no kind of planned oversight or supervision — that would have been the real nightmare.”