BRIK McDILL: What has realignment of prisons wrought? More than state warned
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Well, golly, gee whiz -- AB 109 is still a newborn and here's what we have already found:
* That California counties north to south have received two to three times the number of realigned triple-nons -- nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual felons -- and parolees estimated by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. This at a time when city and county law enforcement and court budgets are being shrunk.
* That counties are suddenly recognizing that the health and mental health needs (and costs) of the CDCR transferees far exceed needs and costs estimated and funded for by the state.
Counties are now beginning to realize that the court cases currently plaguing the state (Plata, Coleman, Perez and multiple others) may very well follow on the tails of the state realignees into county lockups.
Parolees are cutting off their electronic anklets, absconding, and skating free and untracked to whatever destination they fancy.
Jails are finding themselves severely under-bedded and understaffed to meet the underestimated influx of realignees, as well as probation departments, which find probation officer caseloads swelling beyond reasonable caps.
As a consequence of lack of beds, jails are now daily releasing inmates with terms shortened to a length that is a standing joke (from months to mere hours) among those affected.
Counties are reporting serious delays in getting critical information from the state about arriving realigned parolees.
Realigned parolees do not even bother to show up for initial appointments, cannot be tracked or found, or even busted for the no-show. So why bother to show up at all?
Electronic monitoring agencies cannot keep up with the flood of ankle alarms going off 24/7, only a small fraction of which are ever followed up on.
Sheriffs are reporting that filling county beds with realigned state inmates forces them to cancel federal prison bed contracts that pay more per diem than the state, with the effect that county income levels are reduced at the very time when expenses are increasing.
That "conditions of parole" are non-enforceable, and that non-revocable parolees are ignoring those conditions with impunity and are continuing their crime.
With a few exceptions, counties are scrambling to figure things out and doing so with inadequate funding and manpower, this after they've found their best laid plans are inadequate for the projection-exceeding flood of realigned inmates and parolees.
Recent actual serious injuries to jail staff have shown that realigned county inmates are far more violent than their most recent crime reveals, and that inmates rated triple-nons are rated so on the basis of their most recent crime only and not on their record of past crimes, many of which are violent. This has caused sheriffs to begin developing their own violence assessment tools in lieu of using the state's recently developed (but apparently unreliable) tool.
That's a quick summary of what has already happened. But what about clearly foreseeable problems yet to arise -- perhaps more quickly and of greater size than expected?
Twenty-six percent of all CDCR inmates are in the Coleman class of seriously mentally ill. What is Kern County prepared to do with those non-revocable realigned parolees as they become a swelling cohort of the potentially homeless mentally ill, most of whom will be soon without their psychiatric medications? Are homeless shelters prepared with beds and sustenance to receive them -- some of whom are dangerous and violent with or without their meds -- without staff trained in the subtleties and dangers of the hands-on management of mental illness?
And what about the parolee who is seriously medically ill, and now possibly homeless and medically indigent? Is the county really prepared for this resource-draining influx as well? And does the county really know the size and resource drain of this influx? Remember, county experience throughout the state is that the influx is two to three times the projection.
What about existing county social service agencies? Are they prepared as well for these problems as well?
The employment prospects for realigned releasees are slim to none, creating a swelling pool of unemployed non-revocable parolees with little to nothing to do. Do we foresee a problem here? Are local sheriffs and police prepared to deal kindly and humanely with this population of people, most of them likely to become homeless, or will they wind up engaging in the age-old practice of "bus ticket" sweeps to send local problems to other counties, which in turn "bus ticket" their problems to us?
So many foreseeable problems, so few solutions.
Brik McDill, Ph.D., is a senior supervising psychologist at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi.
