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The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to form a task force to help non-violent ex-cons update their records under Proposition 47 and to link them to jobs and services.
Proposition 47 — dubbed by supporters the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act — was approved by 59.6 percent of California voters in 2014. It reduced some non-violent drug and property crimes — such as shoplifting, receiving stolen property and writing bad checks of less than $950 — from felonies to misdemeanors.
Supervisors Hilda Solis and Mark Ridley-Thomas proposed the task force and Solis said it would bolster public safety.
“The primary purpose of the motion today is to reduce crime,” Solis said. “Jail and prison have become a revolving door.”
The task force will focus on connecting individuals coming out of jail and prison with jobs, housing, health care and mental health and substance abuse treatment and finding funding for those services.
“For the last 40 years, our broken criminal justice system has drained communities like South Los Angeles,” said Karren Lane of the Community Coalition of policies that doled out harsh punishments for drug and other non-violent offenses.
Solis highlighted the barriers faced by ex-offenders.
“Having a felony conviction makes it difficult to get work, to get housing, to get services and to put your life back together,” Solis told her colleagues.
Public Defender Ronald L. Brown said individuals in prison and jail suffer disproportionately from mental illness and substance abuse and told the board that treatment is critical to success outside of jail.
“Prisons don’t encourage inmates to address their drug problems,” Brown said.
Proponents say the proposition provides a more just penalty for low-level offenders. Anticipated savings from the law are intended to be spent on mental health and substance abuse treatment, truancy and dropout prevention and victim services.
“I think what we’re talking about is a hand up, not a hammer down,” said Bruce Brodie of the county’s office of Alternate Public Defender.
Other backers point to how Prop 47 has alleviated prison overcrowding and allowed more serious offenders to serve a greater proportion of their sentence.
However, opponents say Prop 47 puts dangerous criminals who should be behind bars out on the streets.
Supervisor Michael Antonovich pointed to criminals who are released only to commit new crimes, citing the example of one man who had been arrested 22 times after his initial release.
“Violent crime is up 4.2 percent,” Antonovich said.
Supervisor Sheila Kuehl challenged the idea that the proposition was linked to higher crime rates.
“There has been a lot of rhetoric about Prop 47 and a rise in crime rates and it’s just that, rhetoric. There is no data,” Kuehl said.
Kuehl said San Diego County hasn’t seen a rise in crime since Prop 47 became effective.
There are roughly 695,000 Los Angeles County residents who are eligible to apply to change their criminal records under Prop 47, according to Brown, who told the board that his office is overwhelmed by the need to help ex-offenders “become employed, tax-paying citizens of this county.”
One community advocate said many of those eligible were unaware of the potential to change their lives.
“Two out of three people who qualify for Prop 47 are not even aware” it exists, said Amber Rose Howard of All of Us or None.
The task force was also charged with trying to extend the deadline to apply for a criminal record change, currently set for Nov. 3, 2017.
The board directed staffers from the Office of Diversion and Re-Entry to work with the city of Los Angeles’ Office of Reentry to push for the region’s share of state funding from Prop 47 savings. A report back is expected in six months.
The board also asked the Auditor-Controller to audit the county’s savings as a result of Prop 47.
by Karen Shain, Criminal Justice Policy Officer
The first thing I noticed when we walked into the cell block was a woman sitting on top of a metal table. She saw us and slowly crawled off the table to sit on a metal stool. That’s as far as she could go, because she was tethered to the table by a chain.
A guard told us it’s a violation to sit on the table, but they don’t sweat the small stuff in the mental health wing. We weren’t in a mental health facility; this was the Century Regional Detention Facility (CRDF), L.A. County’s main women’s jail.
This is where CRDF holds seriously mentally ill women who don’t have the resources to be admitted into private mental health hospitals. The guards explained that the women were always under physical control. They could stay in their single cells (which contained a metal bed and a toilet), be locked into a shower by themselves, could go “outside” (though a roof prevents them from seeing the sky or the sun), or they could sit chained to a table in the “day room.”
As long as a County mental health professional deems them a danger to themselves or others, these women will be held indefinitely. The only way out is for them to get better, but how can they get better under these circumstances?
Mental illness is not a crime; it is a disease. CRDF does not treat women with this disease. It only pushes them further inward, back into their demons. What I witnessed was torture. Is that the best we can do?
I left the mental health wing of CRDF with an extremely heavy heart. But I also realized that if the Sheriff’s Department showed us this mental health wing – something they can’t be proud of – they must be looking for advocates to help them fund a new jail with improved conditions for women.
But even the goal of “improved” conditions misses the point. Treatment, not incarceration, is the solution for most women, and effective treatment cannot happen under duress.
Nearly one out of every three women (31 percent) in county jails is there because of mental illness, which is double the percentage for men. As the nation and California dismantled mental health facilities and funding over the decades, our jails and prisons have become the largest mental institutions in the country. Believe it or not, they are also the largest geriatric facilities and homeless shelters.
Building more jails will not help these women or men, nor will it stop cycles of crime that jeopardize our neighborhoods and our personal safety because it is well-known that persons with mental illness who are put in jail have much higher rates of recidivism than those who receive mental health treatment in the community. Managing mentally ill people in our prisons and jails is also far more expensive than providing treatment in the community – treatment which is also much better than what is provided in jail.
This is not only about Los Angeles; it’s a national problem. But Los Angeles has the opportunity to do something better.
The LA Board of Supervisors is at a crossroads. They have several proposals before them to construct both a new women’s and mental health jail. The construction cost? Between $1.4-$1.6 billion, which does notinclude operating expenses, such as the almost $250 per day it costs to house and treat a woman with mental illness in jail. What if we tried something different—and better? Let’s redirect these billion plus dollars and invest instead in comprehensive and humane mental health and substance abuse treatment. As the Affordable Care Act (ACA), our national health reform law, is implemented in coming months, we have an opportunity to expand mental health and substance abuse access and treatment. Under ACA people who are financially eligible will be able to get mental health and substance abuse treatment at very little cost to California, but ONLY if they are not in jail.
California’s residents who bear the double burden of being impoverished and mentally ill should not find that their only option for mental health treatment is available if they fall into the criminal justice system. Treating them in the community would be the real way to improve their lives and those of their families and community, not putting them in a new and costly jail.
via http://womensfoundationofcalifornia.org/2013/10/18/jail-is-no-place-to-treat-womens-mental-health-issues/
Fight to Stop San Mateo County Jail Heats Up
Residents Demand Supervisors Cut Jail Spending from Budget, Call for Hearing on Population Reduction Measures
Press Contact: Isaac Ontiveros
Californians United for a Responsible Budget, 510-517-6612
What: Press Conference and Board of Supervisors Meeting
When: Tuesday September 11th, 2012, 8:15am
Where: 400 County Center, Redwood City
Redwood City—This Tuesday residents from across San Mateo County are expected to pack the Board of Supervisors’ meeting, demanding the Board strike $44.2 million from the county’s 2012-2013 budget slated for a new jail, and hold a hearing on strategies to reduce the jail population. Supervisors will vote on the final budget on September 25th.
“This budget is a plan for the future of our county. Right now the Board is following the Sheriff’s lead in allocating more and more money on cages and less and less on the health and wellbeing of our residents,” says Manuel LaFontaine of All of Us or None, one of the organizations opposing the jail. “We are demanding that the Board make another plan: to reduce our jail population by investing in alternatives to imprisonment as well as strong re-entry programs and services that will keep people in their communities where they belong.”
Two of the county’s financial officers, the County Manager and the County Controller voiced strong concerns about the cost of the jail, as have thousands of county residents. A 2011 report from the County Manager indicates that if the new jail is built “the magnitude of cuts necessary to re-balance the General Fund budget… would be $118 million, or 26% of Net County Cost.” The Manager’s report affirms an American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California finding that “money spent for jail construction and maintenance will inevitably require cuts in county spending on housing, education, healthcare, transit infrastructure, and other more urgently-needed services for San Mateo residents.” Widespread opposition to the jail project has steadily mounted during the county’s budget crisis as $70 million in cuts have left hundreds unemployed and thousands with reduced access to vital services.
The same report from the County Manager outlines many less expensive and more humane alternatives to imprisonment recommended by the County’s Health System, including expanding short-term residential treatment for mental illness and drug detox, expanding the number of people served through alternative sentencing, expanding the Pathways program, and expanding re-entry services. The Health System’s recommendations would take 3-6 months to get up and running, serve 2,100 residents and cost the county $8.38 million a year. By comparison, the new jail would not open until 2015 and will cost $160 million to build and at least $30 million a year to operate.
“The Board of Supervisors is claiming it doesn’t have any other options in the face of alternative recommendations from countless experts,” says Emily Harris, of Californians United for a Responsible Budget. “San Mateo County is surrounded by counties that have decided not to expand their jail systems. Just this week, Contra Costa County rejected a plan to build a new jail because of widespread opposition, joining Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Francisco, and Alameda Counties. It’s not too late to stop this jail.”
“This hits home for so many of us. I am fighting so that my children aren’t pushed into cages. We are fighting for a change in priorities,” says LaFontaine. “It has been poor and working communities of color that have been hit hardest by both budget cuts and imprisonment for way too long. And people are sick and tired and are standing up and saying, ‘we want something different, we are going to stop this’.”
Tuesday morning, community organizations and residents will hold a lively press conference at 8:15am and will then pack the Supervisors’ meeting to speak during public comment at 9am.
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