CAN PRISON GROWTH BE SLOWED?

Solutions may attract criticism, officials say

Creating alternatives to sending more people to prison would likely
buck public attitudes and open politicians to charges of being soft on
crime.

Shortly after a Feb. 15 legislative hearing on alternative sentencing
proposals, the head of an influential crime victims' organization
issued a news release blasting what he called misinformation by
"criminal sympathizers in our state."

"For their own agendas, criminal sympathizers want everyone to believe
that our jails and prisons are filled up with first and/or second-time
convicted, non-violent criminals," including those convicted of
possessing small amounts of drugs, said Sanford "Sandy" Krasnoff,
director of Victims and Citizens Against Crime.

Krasnoff said first-time non-drug and non-violent offenders are rarely
given jail or prison sentences.

He said 69 percent of the state's inmates were sentenced as violent or
career criminals, while the other 31 percent were convicted of
"serious drug crimes."

A January Office of Corrections Services "fact sheet" said only 38.85
percent were imprisoned for violent crimes, 31.16 for drug crimes and
21.35 percent for property crimes. Another 8.6 percent were in for sex
crimes and "all other" crimes.

Corrections Secretary Richard Stalder said he is mindful of the
potential for criticism as he ponders a three-prong approach to
slowing the growth of Louisiana's incarceration rate, the highest in
the nation.

Stalder envisions more programs to prevent crime in the first place,
plus expanding efforts to help people who are on probation because of
an initial brush with the law.

"The third thing is ... the people who are in prison. How do we keep
them from coming back?

"Teach them to read and write, teach them a job skill, give them drug
treatment and you will make a significant dent in the growth of
incarceration," Stalder said.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is that it would be helpful if we in
the corrections community could communicate to the public that we're
not talking about being soft on crime here, we're talking about
consequences for their (criminals') actions and forcing them to do the
kinds of things that will result in less victimization and fewer
resources spent in the corrections environment," Stalder said.

"It's really a public safety issue. To slow the growth of
incarceration, you do some things that are directly public safety
related. Because, when we teach an inmate how to weld and he goes to
work release in New Orleans and goes to work at Avondale, and works on
the job and stays on the job and doesn't commit a crime, we saved a
victim; we saved the expense to the system and we had a public safety
impact," he said.

Cecile C. Guin, director of the LSU School of Social Work's research
and development office, said leadership will be vital to slowing the
incarceration rate.

"To me, real leadership would be coming back and saying, 'I understand
that you want to lock up everyone, but as a leader of this state,
we've got to look long-range and not just lock up the disturbed
adolescent today who will be out in five years and really victimize
someone,'" Guin said.

Guin said she worries that state officials will not make a serious
effort.

"My fear is that we will ... half-way do this thing: Let some people
out of prison without realistically assessing their risks to society
and what they need on the outside to make it, see them victimize
somebody else and then say, 'Uh, we tried that; we've tried
alternative sentences; we've let them out and it didn't work.'

"It won't work unless the sentencing is appropriate to what's wrong
with them," Guin said.

Luceia LeDoux, Guin's colleague, said integrating education,
behavioral health care and other systems is essential

LeDoux said a person in trouble with the law, especially a teen-ager,
may have many problems and shortcomings for which services are spread
among agencies and agencies within agencies: law enforcement,
education, corrections, social services, health and hospitals.

"These are individual people who have these profiles (of risk factors
needing services). The person is integrated; the services are
separated. The Department of Public Safety and Corrections is an end
run of trying to undo what's been done by multiple agencies -- the
failure of multiple agencies," LeDoux said.

"The solution is not just for the Department of Public Safety and
Corrections to correct (an individual) but it is for service systems
to become more integrated," she said.

LeDoux also said a really good correctional system should be based on
science and "not how people 'feel' about it. That's one of our big
pitfalls."

Does Louisiana have the political will to seriously address the
problems that feed teen-agers and young adults into the corrections
system?

Fifteenth Judicial District Court Judge Jules Edwards III said
"legislators are ready to hear this message" about alternative
sentencing and correctional options. "We have been talking about
sentencing options for years."

He said in the past, legislators wanted him to "show me what is
working. I always say to them we already have a system that is not
working," so trying something new but well-planned can only help, he
said.

Burk Foster, a criminal justice professor at the University of
Louisiana at Lafayette, has his doubts.

Giving judges more flexibility in sentencing would be going against a
trend in the opposite direction, he said.

"Compounding that problem is that the judges are all popularly
elected, so they're very concerned about the community interest,
victims' rights and these other issues. So you find that judges are
generally much more punitive in their orientation toward dealing with
criminals today than they were a generation ago," Foster said.

"You'd have to convince the judges who are doing the sentencing, as
influenced by other people such as probation officers, prosecutors and
other people, that they need to explore these options more. I don't
frankly think a lot of judges are real committed to that notion," he
said.

"In Louisiana, we still have this attitude that it's kind of an 'us
against them' mentality. The 'us' is like white people from rural
areas, and 'them' is like black people from urban areas. So, you've
got the bulk of the people in the prison system from urban Orleans and
Jefferson, East Baton Rouge and Caddo parishes. ... They're
predominately black.

"The people outside of the urban areas are kind of in a defensive
mode, trying to protect themselves from the depredations of crime. I
don't know that you can really sell the idea of alternative sentencing
to the majority of the public," Foster said.

Of the nearly 35,000 prisoners in state custody on Jan. 11, 76.3
percent were black, according to the Office of Corrections Services.

"The only reason we've been able to keep our costs down the last 10
years is by transferring more state prisoners into the parish jails
... but that's at the cost of the conditions of confinement of those
people who are housed in those parish jails. Security is lower, you'll
find more incidents of misconduct, services are lower, medical care is
not as good," Foster said.

But "most people in Louisiana want the convicts to be treated as
cheaply and miserably as possible, especially because they're mostly
black and mostly from urban areas," he said.

Stalder said most of the parish facilities, which house about half of
the state's inmates, do not have the resources to offer vocational and
other types of educational programs that would help inmates after they
are released.

"There are notable exceptions. Orleans Parish is a notable exception.
Sheriff Charles Foti has got an About Face program that's an excellent
program. The big places are doing things. But I can't tell you you can
go to East Carroll Parish and find that there are a lot of
rehabilitative opportunities," Stalder said.

"But, I can tell you they'd be willing to do whatever the state's
willing to pay for. For $23 a day there's not a lot of slack to do a
lot of intensive educational programs," he said.