I patrolled the beat of South Central Los Angeles at the height of the crack epidemic, when that drug took thousands of lives in a 15-square mile neighborhood. Those glistening crystals of crack cocaine snuffed out the lives, the hopes, and dreams of mothers, fathers, and too many children to count.
The problems then were made worse by bad laws and soft-on-crime judges, who released violent, dope-peddling criminals back on to the streets. Now, some on Capitol Hill and elsewhere are intent on repeating the mistakes of the past.
Back then, I busted hundreds of suspects, only to see them “serve their time” in no time flat. Thanks to programs like early release and judicial leniency, the perpetrators would, like Houdini, magically reappear on the same dope corners (and eventually in the back of a squad car) months, sometimes weeks or days later, over and over again
When California — aided by tougher federal laws — got tough on criminals by the mid-1990s, the killings, robberies, and addiction rates dropped. In just 20 years, the number of murders in my former beat of South Central L.A. fell by almost 80 percent.
Sadly, the Golden State is now reliving the bad old days. And many on Capitol Hill want to bring California’s woes to every town in America.
The FIRST STEP Act, the current federal prison reform bill, is not what proponents claim it to be. Reform is fine, but let’s call this bill what it is — a prison release bill. Proponents are obsessed with buzzwords and obfuscation because they know that early release for heroin traffickers is wildly unpopular. But if enacted, the bill will endanger public safety, do little to nothing to improve the lives of former prisoners, and it will take decades to undo the harm this would inflict on law-abiding Americans.
Since 2011, when California accelerated its retread of soft-on-crime rules, violent crime has risen 15 percent. And it is getting worse, rising 18 percent in just the last 4 years. It’s up almost 40 percent in Los Angeles County alone since 2014. Property crime, down consistently across the country for 25 years, has spiked dramatically in urban California since the state reduced penalties and began releasing offenders early.
Those offenders, once locked up or “incapacitated” in state prisons, now roam the streets. Of the nearly 79,000 individuals arrested in Los Angeles County under new sentencing guidelines through December 2017, more than 32,000 have been subsequently arrested at least twice — with more than 25,000 of the repeat offenders charged with serious felonies.
At the same time, California has embarked on efforts to “cure” prisoners through in-prison programming for drug treatment, anger management, and other counseling. With over 75 percent of prisoners re-arrested within 5 years of release, it is a laudable goal to reduce recidivism. But it’s laughable to claim that these programs reduce the rates of recidivism.
A 2007 California Inspector General’s report found that the billion dollars spent then on prisoner drug treatment was “a complete waste of money.” In fact, studies found that recidivism rates were slightly higher for program participants than for nonparticipants.
Other in-prison treatment programs, especially those that encouraged participation with time off sentences, fared just as poorly elsewhere.
The studies that do show some benefits of these programs are rarely evaluated properly, can almost never be replicated, and, despite being touted ad nauseum by advocates, suffer from quality issues that prevent their widespread implementation.
So why then are proponents hanging their hat on “reforming” prisoners? Oddly, the bill as currently drafted does not even require effectiveness research or data collection on outcomes or any reasonable metric for success. Other than including pseudo-scientific phrases like “evidence-based recidivism reduction programs” (which are never defined or limited), the bill includes time credits for inmates who participate in “productive activities” — which could be almost anything, including dog grooming.
And that’s the kicker: in prison, where all you have is time, the bill gives participating prisoners one day off for every three days of “successful participation.” The problem is there’s no enforcement mechanism to ensure that the programs even work or that they even occupy the prisoner for a specified amount of time. It’s easy to imagine a daily, 30-minute counseling class for 5 years melting away 30 months of hard time under this proposed law.
Worse yet, the bill does not even prevent prisoners from “stacking” their programming and racking up time off concurrently for multiple activities per day – so a single full day of programming could conceivably result in weeks off a hardened criminal’s sentence down the line.
And note that the folks we send to federal prisons are not run-of-the mill offenders. They are drug traffickers and violent criminals whose crimes drew the attention of federal prosecutors.
Still, bill advocates have pushed through such a sloppily written piece of legislation to allow dangerous criminal aliens, including the likes of “El Chapo,” to qualify for time-off credits and “home confinement” in the United States, without requiring or assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement in deporting illegal immigrant criminals.
When you incentivize something, you get more of it. To encourage hardened, dangerous criminals to join in half-baked programming by offering sentence reductions does not fix them — but it certainly ensures they will be out sooner. Moreover, it makes their decision to traffic drugs, kidnap, rape, and kill even more attractive for themselves and potential criminals by reducing their crimes’ consequences.
Some prisoners surely deserve a second chance, but they must earn it and prove to society that they deserve our mercy. Many of these convicts broke the law because they thought they were “getting over” on society. Society owes it to itself to protect itself from them, before they victimize us again.
Thomas Marchetti, a retired detective, served 26 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. Follow him here on Twitter.
