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From LA Daily News

California struggles to save inmate firefighter program

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - California officials are struggling to save a program that has 4,300 inmates fighting wildfires each year, the most of any state.

They say the program is crucial to fighting massive fires, but it's endangered by Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to shift responsibility for lower-level offenders from state prisons to county jails.

The governor proposed the shift to save money and comply with a federal court order to reduce prison crowding.

The same lower-level offenders who would be released or shifted to local jails are generally the ones who qualify for the fire camps.

Officials say the program won't be affected this year because the inmate shift has not yet been funded.

They say the program is even more vital because budget cuts have eliminated 730 seasonal firefighters this year.

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From Capitol Weekly

Booze cited as main driver of violent crime

In recent months, there has been widespread speculation about the dramatic drop in violent crime over the last 30 years. Among the explanations tossed around are the aging population, abortion, better law enforcement and forensics technology, and ‘Three Strikes' and other sentencing laws that have filled the prisons.

But Professor Robert Nash Parker has a far simpler explanation: Blame it on the alcohol.

“The reason why our crime rate is down over 30 years is that 1982 was the peak of [alcohol] consumption in the U.S. over our recent history,” Parker said.

The University of California, Riverside Sociology professor and the co-director of the school's Robert Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies, Parker has spent much of his career studying the link between violent crime and various forces in society.

And one force stands out above all the others, Parker said — and not just in our recent history. Parker said he has data for the U.S. going back to the 1930s, for California going back to the 1960s, and also for many other countries. Across the board, he said, a rise of alcohol consumption is followed by a rise in violence, and a drop is followed by a drop. The U.S. data since Prohibition shows six matching jumps, he said.

Meanwhile, two periods where fewer adults drank and those who did drank less, the late 1930s and the late 1950s, were relatively peaceful times when it came to interpersonal violence. The murder rate in 1960 was about half that of the peak years of 1980 to 1982, when drinking also jumped.  

“If you ask a police officer who has had experience on the streets, he'll tell you alcohol is the biggest contributor to violence he has experienced,” Parker said. “It really is what causes a lot of the violence society deals with. Everybody is concerned about drugs, but drugs-users don't commit violence. Drug dealers do, but not drug users. And drinkers do.”

Beau Phillips, an outside spokesman for the Beer Institute, a Washington-based industry lobbyist, said most of Parker's publications on the topic were from 12 or more years ago, and that Parker's ideas have gotten little traction from lawmakers.

“Where's the news hook I am missing here?” Phillips asked.

As mind-altering drugs go, Parker said, alcohol has a unique relationship to violence, he said. Beyond just impairing judgment, it makes it hard for intoxicated people to properly interpret the people and events around them. It also shortens people's “time horizon,” Parker said: “Normally, you might think ‘I'll get arrested, I'll lose my job, my wife will divorce me, I'll lose my kids.' All you're thinking is, I want to shut that bastard up and I'm going get him.”

Many people think the use of drugs like crack cocaine and methamphetamine are associated with violence as well, Parker noted, but statistically, these hardly make a blip. In the majority of cases where people on these drugs committed violence, he said, the perpetrators were also drinking.

Then there's the matter of prevalence. Even if crack drove people to violence as much as some people think it does, less than 2 percent of the U.S. adult population has ever tried crack, let alone use it regularly. While the effects of these drugs are devastating on the people who actually use them, they don't add up to a public health problem on a large scale.

Similarly, Parker scoffs at the idea that three strikes laws in California or anywhere else have had anything to do with the drop in violence. They're a trailing indicator - meaning that violence rates were already dropping significantly at the time when these laws went into effect. Alcohol, he said, has a decades-long status as a leading indicator of violence rates.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of American adults drink alcohol. This group includes Parker, who said he drinks moderately at social occasions, something he said has led to some teasing from friends and colleagues. But what this means is that a huge percentage of the population has the potential to drink too much on occasion and get out of control.

Parker also said he doesn't want to bring back Prohibition — though he adds that that era is widely misunderstood. In the public consciousness, it's a time of high levels of violence, with gangsters blowing each other away with Tommy guns in a bid to control bootlegging turf. It's also thought of as a time when hundreds of people died, went blind or had other health problems related to drinking bathtub gin and underground products adulterated with rubbing alcohol and turpentine.

All of which is true — but overall rates of violence and alcohol-related diseases plummeted. If all the alcohol in the world disappeared overnight, Parker estimates, the murder rate would drop 10 percent immediately.

We even have a recent example, he said. In the late 1990s, the city of Barrow, Alaska, banned and unbanned alcohol sales three times. As an isolated community of 4,600, mainly accessible by boat and plane, a ban actually meant something. When the ban went into effect, he said, hospital admissions for assault dropped 90 percent. When it was voted out, the city quickly had three murders, the first in years.

Parker wants to see the existing state and local control over alcohol used to better effect. He'd like to limit the number of liquor stores and licenses, particularly in poorer areas and in times when violent crime rates are rising.

He'd also like to see more places banning what he said is the king of violent drinks: the 40 oz. bottle of chilled malt liquor. They're cheap, convenient and deliver twice the alcohol of regular beer.

“People are opening them before they get out the door,” Parker said. “You ingest a whole lot of alcohol quickly, and suddenly the parking lot becomes a battleground.”

Warm malt liquor needs to be taken home and refrigerated, while most people prefer to drink their hard liquor with ice and mixers - all steps that make it less likely that someone will quickly end up intoxicated in public.

Meanwhile, he wants to decriminalize—but not legalize marijuana—and deescalate the drug war in favor of treatment.

So who's right? We may soon get to find out. After three decades that mostly saw drops or stagnation in alcohol consumption, the amount of alcohol Americans down has recently gone up again.

If You're Worried About Crime, You're a Racist

The Sacramento Bee would have you believe that if you favor taking a hard line on crime, you are no better than the reprobates from America's past who argued for slavery.

Michelle Alexander and Ruth Wilson Gilmore spent more than 800 words in the June 5th Sacramento Bee to make the point I just made in my headline with eight. But whether laid out pithily in eight words or belabored for 800 — or 8,000 for that matter — twaddle is still twaddle.

The authors begin their piece as follows: “The fearmongering responses to the U.S. Supreme Court declaring California's prison system ‘cruel and unusual' in violation of the Eighth Amendment were predictable.”

My most recent piece concerned this very topic, and indeed I struck a note of concern — “fearmongering,” in the authors' view — over the ramifications to California that might follow in the wake of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata. And if my reaction was predictable, no less so was that of Alexander and Gilmore, both of whom have written books ( here and here) in which they condemn the American criminal justice system as racist.

Yes, I admit to being less sanguine than are Alexander and Gilmore at the prospect of 46,000 convicted felons being loosed upon an unwary populace, but contrary to their assumptions (and is there any doubt what they would assume about me?), I am unconcerned with the melanin content of these criminals' skin. Rather, I am concerned with seeing these criminals remain behind bars for the period of time the law prescribes as a consequence of their misdeeds. Whatever significance I attach to their skin color is derived solely from the fact that the majority of California's felons have been sent to prison for victimizing people whose complexion matches their own.

But Alexander and Gilmore see sinister motives in my desire to see felons do their time. They write:

Any student of anti-racist civil rights struggles — against slavery, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, race-based immigration controls — finds in the historical record similar reactions to decisions perceived to benefit poor people of color. The prognosis is always perpetual disorder.

Thus in just a few words do the authors distill what is perhaps the favorite rhetorical device from the leftist handbook, to wit, to insinuate that anyone who opposes them on any issue is morally deficient, in this case racist. If you favor taking a hard line on crime, if you think felons deserve to do a proper stretch in the big house, you are no better than the reprobates from America's past who argued for slavery and the other moral failings cited above.

Alexander and Gilmore argue that the impending release of such a large number of felons should be of little concern, as “nearly everyone sentenced to prison leaves.” And they point out that the average California prison term is just 54 months. True enough, but if compliance with the Brown v. Plata decision results in the worst-case scenario of wholesale early release and permanent reduction in the prison population, it will mean that at any given time there will be 46,000 felons roaming the streets of California who otherwise would be behind bars. If Alexander and Gilmore believe this will have no significant impact on crime in the state, I'm keen to learn how they think those 46,000 miscreants will be spending their time if not by practicing the same craft that got them locked up in the first place.

And if it is the welfare of “people of color” Alexander and Gilmore are concerned with, they should be aware that about 55 percent of California's state prison inmates are incarcerated for “crimes against persons,” i.e., everything from murder to assault to sex crimes, the vast majority of which were committed against members of the offender's own ethnic group. Like the majority in Brown v. Plata , indeed like nearly everyone on the left, Alexander and Gilmore are more sympathetic to criminals than to those who suffer at their hands.

Alexander and Gilmore also decry the hardships endured by parolees, the “modestly educated men and women released every day [who] go back to urban and rural communities to restart lives.” Note the reference to the “modestly educated,” as though one's level of education, like one's criminal behavior, is merely the fated result of powerful, even irresistible, forces rather than a logical consequence of one's own choices.

They point to one woman, Susan Burton, as emblematic of the type of program they would like to see implemented on a wider scale. But Burton's experience seems to argue at least as strongly for my position as it does for Alexander and Gilmore's. Burton was hailed last year as one of CNN's “Heroes” for her work in assisting female parolees in their return to society. Burton herself was a multiple recidivist and cocaine addict before finally getting clean in a rehabilitation program in 1997. After going straight, she founded A New Way of Life Reentry Project, which provides housing, food, clothing, and other help to women newly released from prison. “In return,” CNN reported, “Burton asks that residents stay clean, attend 12-step meetings, and enroll in school, get drug treatment or find work.”

In other words, Burton places expectations of responsibility on the women she helps, the very sort of expectations Alexander and Gilmore seem willing to forgo in the criminals whom they enrobe in the comforting mantle of victimhood. If all ex-cons would but make the wise choices Burton demands of her clients, recidivism would soon be all but eliminated.

Alexander and Gilmore even employ a noted police executive in their campaign to relieve criminals of moral culpability. “To call the mass incarceration of poor people ‘unintended,'” they write, “is to ignore the teachings of philosopher-police chief William Bratton. He unabashedly told Los Angeles organizers that when Jim Crow was found unconstitutional, legislators wrote new laws using different criteria to get similar outcomes.”

I couldn't locate the quote attributed to Bratton online, so I was unable to evaluate its context. But given that he oversaw the dramatic increase in arrests in Los Angeles that accompanied an equally dramatic drop in crime, I'd be curious to hear his reaction to having his words interposed in such a fashion.  If Bratton is indeed a “philosopher,” his tenure as chief of the LAPD proved the philosophy he practiced was little more than “Brattonism,” i.e., the relentless advancement of his own agenda at the expense of anything or anyone that threatened to impede it. And in the exercise of that philosophy he was not above pandering to whatever political constituency that served his ends. If he had any qualms about all those arrests his officers were making, he certainly didn't express them while violent crime in Los Angeles was being cut in half.

The “mass incarceration” that Alexander and Gilmore lament is not an exercise in “racial domination and social exclusion” as they claim, but rather the consequence of mass lawbreaking which is sadly more prevalent among some ethnic groups than others. California's prisons are overcrowded because so many people have chosen to engage in the type of conduct that earns one a bunk bed behind bars. Forty-six thousand of those people may soon be out on the streets and free to resume that type of conduct. Calling attention to this fact is neither racist nor “fearmongering.” Maybe there really is something to be afraid of.

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