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State Budget Cutbacks Lead To An Unexpected Silver Lining: Prison Reform

By Scott Keyes on Feb 7, 2011 at 7:45 pm

Over the past few years, states have acutely felt the pain of our nation’s economic woes. As some governors cope with revenue shortfalls by raising taxes and others enact deep cuts to education and other services, a silver lining has emerged out of the budget crunches: prison reform.

Those advocating for prison reform are not calling on states to shut down all penitentiaries and allow murderers back on the streets. Rather, the aim is to take a more sensible approach to our criminal justice system. For example, states currently use prison as the standard resort for most nonviolent offenders. Certainly justice demands that crime not go unpunished, but not every offense merits the same response, especially one as expensive to taxpayers as prison.

Over the past 40 years, our nation’s prison population has increased more than 700 percent. As a result, state governments now spend $50 billion every year on its prison budget, while the federal government chips in another $5 billion.

Still, as states face difficult budget situations, more governors from across the political spectrum are taking up the mantle of prison reform:

- Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R): Ohio currently faces an $8 billion budget shortfall. As a result, newly-elected Gov. Kasich called reforming Ohio’s prison system “low-hanging fruit” that could help close the deficit. “Do you think we should put a person, a check kiter or someone who’s been put in prison for eight months, in the state pen[itentiary]?” Kasich told reporters during a December press conference. “Do you know what it costs to put somebody in the state pen? We approach – I’ve gotta throw a number out and I’ll get in trouble – I’ve been told 30-40 percent of our prisoners are in the state pen for less than a year. Why didn’t we fix that? [...] To me, that’s low-hanging fruit. [...] I think it makes total sense and it would save us money.”

- Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R): Tasked with closing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, Gov. Scott is targeting the state’s oversized prison system for cuts. The Florida Independent notes that his transition team endorsed “initiatives that will keep prison populations low by focusing on rehabilitating prisoners and making it easier for them to get jobs and return to normal lives, which reduces recidivism. That reduces the cost of caring for prisoners, and the need to build new prisons.” In total, Scott has called for $1 billion to be cut from the state Department of Corrections budget.

- Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R): In his inaugural address, Gov. Deal put criminal justice reform at the top of his agenda for the state. He decried the fact “one out of every 13 Georgia residents is under some form of correctional control,” costing the state $3 million per day. In part because of the Peach State’s $1 billion budget deficit, Deal called for structural changes in the state’s justice system, including providing prison alternatives to non-violent offenders, such as “Day Reporting Centers, Drug, DUI and Mental Health Courts and expanded probation and treatment options.” Change is coming quickly – this spring, Georgia plans to close Metro State Prison, a move that will save $19 million.

- California Gov. Jerry Brown (D): Facing a $25 billion budget shortfall, California is in one of the most precarious financial situations of any state. One of the solutions proposed by Gov. Brown is to implement major reforms to the state’s criminal justice system, including sending non-violent offenders and strengthening county rehabilitation programs. In total, Brown’s proposed changes will save the state over $1.6 billion.

- Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R): Mississippi’s release last month of the Scott sisters generated national headlines because their freedom was contingent on Gladys Scott donating a kidney to the her ailing sister Jamie. One of the principle reasons Barbour chose to suspend their life sentences was due to the $200,000 price tag Mississippi taxpayers had to foot in order to maintain Jamie’s daily dialysis. Prior to their release, the Scott sisters had been serving dual life sentences for a 1993 armed robbery that netted the two women $11. Their case had been highlighted by civil rights groups like the NAACP, who criticized the unduly harsh sentences.

Prison reform is a rare area of public policy that cuts through the liberal-conservative divide. When fewer non-violent offenders are sent to prison, conservatives cheer at the taxpayer savings and liberals smile at a more compassionate justice system. It’s no coincidence that a bipartisan group of governors is currently taking up the cause of prison reform. Though budget crunches have forced many states to make difficult cuts, it is heartening that many governors are using the opportunity to take a smarter approach on criminal justice.

Economy

Unless Lawmakers Act, 236,000 Workers In Nine States Will Prematurely Lose Unemployment Benefits

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 7, 2011 at 6:10 pm

Democrats in Congress, along with the Obama administration, have had to go to great lengths on multiple occasions to extend unemployment benefits for out of work Americans, even with the labor market incredibly weak and fragile. Congressional Republicans have repeatedly blocked benefit extensions, and only agreed to the last extension in return for Democrats agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans.

However, even after all that, there are still hundreds of thousands of Americans who may be denied their extended benefits. According to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, nine states have yet to enact the required legislation allowing them to draw on the final tier of extended benefits provided by the federal government:

A share of $876 million is waiting to be tapped by Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming to provide 13-20 weeks of federal unemployment insurance — the extra and typically last leg of benefits that jobless workers can receive if they have exhausted their regular state and federal unemployment insurance without finding work. If the federal funds go unused, nearly 236,000 long-term unemployed workers will continue to be prematurely cut off the full range of unemployment insurance Congress approved in 2009 — a maximum of 99 weeks in high-unemployment states — and their states will lose out on millions in economic activity to support local business and job creation.

These last 13-20 weeks of unemployment insurance are available to high unemployment states, provided that state law allows for them. These nine states, unlike 26 other eligible states, have yet to change state law to accommodate for extended benefits. According to the latest data, the unemployment rate is above six percent in all of these states; it stands at 8 percent in Louisiana and 10.1 percent in Mississippi.

Of course, some of the governors in these states have scored political points by grandstanding against unemployment benefit extensions. Govs. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) and Haley Barbour (R-MS), for instance, both made a big show out of “rejecting” extended unemployment benefits made available by the Recovery Act.

Last week’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that just 36,000 jobs were created last month. 43.8 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months, and there are still about five job seekers for every available job opening. To cut off benefits — and force even more economic contraction as people who would have been spending benefits don’t — is absolute folly.

Security

Israeli Opposition Leader Endorses Notion That Lack Of Middle East Peace Damages Regional Interests

By Ben Armbruster on Feb 7, 2011 at 6:00 pm

Last year, right-wing darling Gen. David Petraeus caused quite a stir among conservatives for endorsing the (seemingly obvious) idea that America’s relationship with Israel and that relationship’s failure to help bring about a lasting peace with the Palestinians damages U.S. interests in the wider Middle East. “Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace,” he said in a statement to Congress, is the first among “a number of cross-cutting issues that serve as major drivers of instability, inter-state tensions, and conflict” that “can serve as root causes of instability or as obstacles to security”:

“The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [area of responsibility]. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. [...] Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.”

Israel hawks and neocons like to dismiss this line of thinking — so-called “linkage” — because, as CAP’s Matt Duss once noted, they think “the U.S.-Israel relationship exists in a sort of hermetically sealed bubble, separated from the U.S.’s other challenges in the region, generating no negative externalities for U.S. interests.”

But his idea isn’t just an American one. Reporting from the annual Herzliya Conference in Israel, Duss writes that in a keynote address, former foreign minister and current opposition leader Tzipi Livni endorsed linkage:

“I do not believe Israel is the source of extremism in region,but the conflict has influenced both existing peace agreements with our neighbors, and impacted our ability to change reality in region. [...] We don’t have border conflicts with Egypt and Jordan, but this is a cold peace. It is a cold peace because of the linkage between the conflict and our relationship with these countries. … These governments have had to cope with hostile public opinion because of conflict.”

During Israel’s national election campaign in 2009, Livni, running the be the country’s next prime minister, told an American journalist that she would evacuate Jewish settlers in the West Bank in order to achieve peace and advance a Palestinian state. Yet after challenger and now-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he wouldn’t evacuate settlements, Livni was “forced to disassociate herself from the understandings.”

At the same time, Livni seems to understand the impact the settlements have. Referring to the breakdown of direct talks over Netanyahu’s refusal to extend a moratorium on settlement construction in her speech today, Duss adds that Livni said “It’s not a matter of just building a few new houses. We need to choose between that [settlements] and the continuation of negotiations.”

Yglesias

Diplomacy At Work In Sudan

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 7, 2011 at 5:28 pm

Until recently, the conventional wisdom has been that a pro-independence referendum for southern Sudan was overwhelmingly likely to end in massive bloodshed. Now it looks like things may work out fairly happily. How’d it happen? Elizabeth Dickinson explains the American diplomacy at work:

In short, all the carrots that U.S. diplomats are offering the Sudanese president seem to be working. Among the prizes for Khartoum are a U.S. promise to remove Sudan from its list of terrorism-supporting states and a possible visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the Sudan Tribune. Earlier this month, U.S. State Department officials also signaled that they would be ready to begin normalization following Sudan’s acceptance of the vote.

That’s great news for the south; as FP contributor Maggie Fick recently explained, normalization with Washington holds great appeal for Bashir — in fact, it’s a big part of his international agenda. So he’s likely to yield to U.S. pressure if it pays off. Bashir’s speech today gets Southern Sudan over one big hurdle toward declaring independence, which it is expected to formally do this July. The next test for U.S. pressure and Sudanese diplomacy is whether an equally congenial atmosphere will accompany talks over tricky issues such as border delineation and the sharing of Sudan’s oil.

The punchline here, sadly, is that normalization is a carrot that can really only be deployed once and so if we use it on behalf of Southern Sudan, our leverage over Darfur runs very thin.

Still, I think there’s a general lesson here. People sometimes look at something like the DPRK’s nuclear proliferation and conclude that there’s little the US can do to influence the behavior of other states short of threatening war. But while North Korea certainly highlights the limits of diplomacy in terms of coercing a profoundly determined actor, the right conclusion to draw is that most national leaders—even “bad guy” ones—don’t want their country to end up like North Korea.

Security

What ABC’s Candid Camera Skit Says About Arizona’s Immigration Law

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Feb 7, 2011 at 5:10 pm

Last Friday, ABC News aired a controversial episode as part of its “What Would You Do?” segment in which a hired actor portrayed a security guard who racially profiled a Latino family in Tucson, Arizona. (The family members were also actors.) The purpose of the skit was to record the reactions of various onlookers with a hidden camera. In all of the situations presented in the segment, witnesses stood up against the racial profiling taking place. The report concludes:

Over two days of filming, we were amazed to see dozens of people stepping up when witnessing racial profiling in action. All kinds of people intervened — in fact, the majority were non-Hispanic. Despite the fact that the anti-immigration law seems popular in Arizona, we didn’t see any evidence of it in this Tucson restaurant.

Watch it:

The Arizona Republic reports that Speaker of the House Kirk Adams sent out a media release demanding ABC retract and apologize for “a fake news story the show produced about Arizona’s new immigration law for the purposes of entertaining viewers with a ‘Candid Camera’ style set-up.” “This is an outrageously inaccurate portrayal of SB-1070 by ABC News,” he said.

In all fairness, SB-1070 does not grant a private security guard the authority to ask anyone about their immigration status. Instead, it requires police to demand proof of legal residency during a legal stop when reasonable suspicion that a person is undocumented exists. That is typically understood to mean that the person being approached about their immigration status must be suspected of breaking some other law before that inquiry takes place.

It’s illegal to impersonate law enforcement, so that’s why ABC carefully avoided that scenario. Meanwhile, SB-1070 establishes a pretty low threshold for what kind of infractions should elicit immigration questioning. A minor traffic violation or a broken tail light could suddenly catapult into an immigration interrogation. Also, since anything from an accent to “dress or appearance” can be used to establish reasonable suspicion that a person is undocumented, the racial profiling taking place in the sketch itself is unfortunately not that far-fetched.

Ultimately, the takeaway of the segment for me wasn’t so much how SB-1070 will be implemented, but rather, how people come to think about its implementation. ABC mentions that “[e]ven though the law triggered a wave of protests, polls showed that over 50 percent of Arizona voters supported the bill.” However, ABC fails to cite the data that makes their whole candid camera stunt noteworthy. Despite the fact that SB-1070′s proponents have claimed otherwise, over 70 percent of all Americans thinks it’s “somewhat” to “very” likely that Latino citizens will be asked for their papers by police who think they are undocumented immigrants. In Arizona, almost half of all voters think the SB-1070 immigration debate has “exposed a deeper sense of racism in our community.” The high level of support for the law seems to imply that the general public is willing to accept these serious drawbacks.

Yet, ABC’s segment suggests that when people actually witness racial profiling, most of them are pretty appalled by it. Granted, it’s certainly possible that the individuals ABC caught on camera aren’t necessarily a representative sample of the electorate. It’s also true that not everyone stood up to defend the people being persecuted. But at least one woman claimed the event changed how she thought about SB-1070, telling ABC that she had “never given a thought to the consequences of the anti-immigration law.” Now, she said, “I’m definitely going to be taking a different view against it.” My guess is she wasn’t the only person who came out feeling that way. As unlikely as it may be that the scenarios depicted by ABC would become the norm under SB-1070, it alarmed at least a few people that something even resembling what was shown could take place in America.

Politics

Pawlenty: Rescinding Funds To Implement DADT Repeal Is ‘A Reasonable Step’

By Igor Volsky on Feb 7, 2011 at 5:00 pm

Last month, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) made waves when he suggested that he would reinstate the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy if elected President. This morning, Pawlenty went a step further, telling ThinkProgress that he would support rescinding the funds necessary for the Department of Defense to implement the repeal. Appearing at the Family Leader’s Presidential Lecture Series in Iowa, which ThinkProgress attended, Pawlenty reiterated his argument for why the policy should not have been repealed and then, when pushed, agreed with ThinkProgress that taking away the funding “would be a reasonable step”:

PAWLENTY: We have to pay great deference, I think to those combat units, their sentiments and their leaders. That’s one of the reasons why I said we shouldn’t have repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and I would support reinstatement.

TP: And rescinding the funds for implementation, implementation of repeal?

PAWLENTY: That would be a reasonable step as well.

Watch it:

Interestingly, the idea to rescind funding has also been suggested by the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, on whose radio show Pawlenty originally said he would like to bring back the DADT policy. Today, Fischer called for getting conservative politicians “on record about where they stand on the issue of the radical homosexual agenda,” demanding these politicians agree that “the homosexual lifestyle itself is extremely dangerous to human health,” just like “smoking.”

Cross posted on Wonk Room.

Update

Pawlenty spokesman Alex Conant emailed a response to our post to Politico’s Ben Smith:

The Governor respects the opinions of the commanding generals and is committed to giving them the resources needed to accomplish their military mission.

In this case, both generals and combat troops have voiced opposition to repealing DADT, and the governor values their perspective. He does not support using resources to implement a policy they oppose.

Alyssa

Double Down

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 7, 2011 at 4:31 pm

Last week, I asked some questions about whether NBC should concentrate on its smart comedy brand. This week, it looks like they’re doing exactly that. They’ve picked up another show from Dan Goor, the producer behind Parks and Recreation, of which I very much like what I’ve seen, though I have to watch more to be able to write about it the way I’d really like to. Goor’s new show is apparently a semi-wacky medical drama, which will fill a hole in NBC’s prime time programming—the network won’t doesn’t have a medical show despite the popularity of the drama, and the USA Network’s done a nice job of proving, via Royal Pains, that medical drama isn’t the only way to engage audiences. I’ll look forward to NBC finding another way to put lots of fast-talking people together in small rooms and long hallways.

Yglesias

Our Unmetro Politics

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 7, 2011 at 4:28 pm

Samuel Arbesman offers us the “city states of America”, a map of states that have over half of their population living in a single metropolitan statistical area:

I think this is mostly a glance at how poorly designed our currently political boundaries are. The definition of a metropolitan area is bound to be somewhat arbitrary around the margin, but these are real social and economic phenomena. But we make important political decisions at the state level. That’s not just state government, it’s senators and the electoral college as well. Some states—California, Texas, Florida—are way too big and encompass multiple major metro areas. Then you get things like Philadelphia. Six million people live in this metropolitan area, more than live in most states. But there’s no state government where their interests dominate. Instead they’re divided between the NYC-focused state of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which is too big to have a focal point. There’s a huge continuous swath of land in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming that gets ten senators and has fewer residents than the Detroit MSA which doesn’t even get to dominate a single state.

Something worth noting is that while overrepresentation of low population states was obviously part of the original constitutional bargain for a reason, this is a different phenomenon. Late 18th century America was such an overwhelmingly rural country that the whole question would have been irrelevant. Meanwhile, some of the metro-dominated states are also low-population states.

Climate Progress

Climate Deniers Look Out, See Catastrophic Storms, Attack Al Gore

By Brad Johnson on Feb 7, 2011 at 4:10 pm

After a year of climate devastation in 2010, this year has begun with more extreme weather across the globe. In the southern hemisphere and along the equator, it is a summer of floods and storms — in Australia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tonga, Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, as well as Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar.

The northern hemisphere’s winter is similarly extreme, with normal patterns of air flow destabilized by a warmed Arctic Ocean. Extreme heat shattered records in California and Canada, while Arctic air and warm oceans combined to produce storm after storm of intense snow throughout Europe and the United States. The Arctic air flooding south brought chaos to the Southwest, leaving Arizonans without gas or electricity and causing rolling blackouts in Texas. Other areas of the world, including Argentina, Chile, and China, are suffering from crippling droughts.

The world has suffered billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure, homes, and crops, with transportation networks and national economies depressed by the extreme weather. Thousands of people have died, and millions more cast into suffering, little more than a month into the year. Global commodity prices have skyrocketed as production of wheat, sugar, rice, corn, and coal have been struck by climate disasters, feeding unrest across the Middle East and elsewhere.

The monster Groundhog’s Day blizzard “stretching from New Mexico to Maine” “paralyzed the nation’s heartland with ice and snow, shuttering airports and schools and leaving normally bustling downtowns deserted.” Satellite imagery shows the continent-wide storm’s massive extent:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the giant Cyclone Yasi, another continent-scale storm, slammed into Australia, the nation’s second-most damaging stom on record:

In response, conservative pundits have little to offer but puerile attacks on Al Gore, with jokes about eating Twinkies, snipes about bank accounts, and flat-out denial of global warming. It’s a “snow-job,” carped conservative meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue, without challenging the fact that global warming pollution is influencing the climate and encouraging extreme weather. Dr. Roy Spencer strangely made the baseless claim that “the annual amount of precipitation that falls on the Earth stays remarkably constant from year to year,” despite significant annual anomalies. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) went so far to attack Gore’s “personal life.”

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